Eric A. Havelock (June 3, 1903 - April 4, 1988) was an expert in classical literature and philosophy, of British origin who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was very active in the academic environment of the socialist movement of Canada during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was the president of classical studies, both at Harvard University and in Yale's.

Havelock radically broke with his own teachers and proposed a totally new model for the understanding of the classical world, based on a marked division between the literature of the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, on the one hand, and that of the fourth century on the other. . Most of Havelock's work consists in developing a single thesis: Western thought is born thanks to a profound change in the way of organizing ideas by the human mind by transforming Greek philosophy, from an initial oral point, to be written and read.

Among his fundamental works, Plato Preface, from 1963, stands out, and La Musa learns to write, from 1986.