Back in Iran during the summer of 1959 Ehsan Yarshater inspired the founding of a lending library by the Anjoman-e Ketab. This came to contain some 3000 books, mostly in the humanities, which people were actively encouraged to borrow, and for a time small mobile collections of books were sent to some of the poorer districts of Tehran, as well as to townships round about.
            When Ehsan Yarshater returned from Columbia in the summer of 1960, Pour-Davud had died, and he was appointed to succeed his former teacher as professor of Old Persian and Avestan. In that year he attended the International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow; and the oral examination was held there of his thesis on "The Tati dialect spoken to the south of Qazvin", for which he was awarded a Ph.D. by London University. The examiners were W.B. Henning, E. Benveniste and I. Gershevitch.
            In the following year Ehsan Yarshater had the happiness to marry Latifeh Alvieh. The two had become friends when he returned from his studies in England in 1953, and had come to discover much in common, notably a deep devotion to Iran and its culture, and an interest in education generally. Latifeh Alvieh was then acting as cultural advisor to the United States Information Agency in Tehran; and her voluntary work included organizing and directing summer camps for schools and university students, and the first youth conference in Iran. She was founder and president of the Shahnaz Girls' Clubs, and a founding member of the National Council of the Women of Iran; and had represented various Iranian organizations at conferences in Germany, India, Ceylon and Turkey, as well as having studied for a year on a visiting fellowship in the United States of America. After their marriage she and Ehsan Yarshater, as well as pursuing their own separate but complementary activities, created together a gracious and profoundly civilized home-life, dispensing a generous hospitality which many were to enjoy over the years.
            Meantime Columbia University was expanding its Middle East department, and with financial help form Hagop Kevorkian had established a chair in Iranian Studies, which in 1961 Ehsan Yarshater was invited to occupy. After much hesitation, and prolonged discussions with his wife, he accepted and embarked thus on an even more arduous but richly productive period of his life. During it he worked immensely hard in New York for three-quarters of the year, and returned every long vacation to Iran to work immensely hard there. He retained the directorship of the Bongah-e Tarjoma, keeping in close touch from the United States with a secession of deputy directors; and he continued as president of the Anjoman-e Ketab, the Rahnema-ye Ketab being mainly in charge of Iraj Afshar. Each summer, after a busy university session, he found awaiting him in Tehran a quantity of matters - scholarly, administrative and financial- which demanded his attention; and a press of people impatient to discuss with him, sometimes at great length, their own particular problems. Yet even in these circumstances his first act was always to set in motion arrangements for a field trip to study yet another dialect which he had identified as little known or insufficiently explored.
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