Shortly after publication of "Preface to Plato", Havelock accepted a position as chair of the Classics Department at Yale University. He remained in New Haven for eight years, and then taught briefly as Raymond Distinguished Professor of Classics at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He retired in 1973 and moved to Poughkeepsie, New York, where his wife Christine Mitchell, whom he had married in 1962, taught at Vassar College. He was a productive scholar after his retirement, writing three books as well as numerous essays and talks expanding the arguments of "Preface to Plato" to a generalised argument about the effect of literacy on Greek thought, literature, culture, society, and law.