John Bethel Camp

John Bethel Camp (1885–1936) was an American author and philologist. He was a scholar of Ancient Greek and Latin, executing an English translation of Hesiod's Works and Days in 1912, when he was only 27 years old. Camp also wrote the satirical novels Tom Tinkerson (1923) and Macherus (1926).

Camp was born in Charlottesville, Virginia, into a well-respected family; his father was a professor of ancient history at the University of Virginia. He attended Yale from 1904 to 1907, and contributed several short pieces to the Yale Literary Magazine while the same magazine was under the editorship of a young Sinclair Lewis. At the same time, Camp translated several Greek works, including the Works and Days and several of the minor plays of Aeschylus.

Camp married in 1911, but his young wife was taken by the influenza epidemic of 1918. Camp was at the time an occasional contributor of fantastical stories to Collier's Weekly, but after his wife's death he became more reclusive and cultivated a quiet cynicism. It was around this time that Camp wrote his satires Tom Tinkerson and Macherus. By the time the latter was published, Camp's health was already failing, and he published only a few more critical essays before his death in 1936 at the age of 51.

John Bethel Camp was buried in Charlottesville's Riverview Cemetery.