Van Wyck Brooks

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Brooks, Van Wyck (1886–1963), born in New Jersey of a wealthy, cultivated family, after graduation from Harvard (1904) entered upon his literary career. In biographies and criticism, beginning with The Wine of the Puritans (1909), he first developed the thesis that the Puritan tradition crushed American culture and placed an undue emphasis on material values, neglecting the aesthetic side of life. This theory is illustrated in America's Coming‐of‐Age (1915), Letters and Leadership (1918), The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), and The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925). He strikingly altered this belief in his later books, which, in addition to a revision of the Mark Twain study, include the very appreciative analyses of American life, Emerson and Others (1927) and Sketches in Criticism (1932). His “history of the writer in America,” titled Makers and Finders, includes The Flowering of New England (1936, Pulitzer Prize), on the period 1815–65; New England: Indian Summer (1940), continuing to 1915; The World of Washington Irving (1944), concerning 1800 to the 1840s outside New England; The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947); and The Confident Years (1952), about the era 1885–1915. All of these present a rich, impressionistic, and anecdotal view of the American literary scene with its writers, great and small, all treated knowingly and appreciatively. Although he did some teaching early at Stanford University (1911–13), edited magazines, edited works by many writers, including Randolph Bourne and Gamaliel Bradford, and translated many French books, his main work throughout his life was devoted to interpreting the literary and cultural life of the U.S. in numerous books which show a steadfast humanism, a Jeffersonian liberalism, and an appreciation of the American past. His views of literature and antipathy to many 20th‐century movements appear in On Literature Today (1941), Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), The Writer in America (1953), and From a Writer's Notebook (1958). His other works on the literary and cultural traditions of this country include John Sloan (1955), a biography of his friend, the artist; Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait (1956); American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–1915 (1958); Howells: His Life and World (1959); and Fenollosa and His Circle (1962). His own impressionistic reminiscences appeared in Scenes and Portraits: Memories of Childhood and Youth (1954); Days of the Phoenix (1957), about the 1920s; and From the Shadow of the Mountain: My Post‐Meridian Years (1961), from 1931 to his birthday—all collected in An Autobiography (1965). His correspondence with Lewis Mumford was published in 1970.

Van Wyck Brooks , 1886-1963, American critic, b. Plainfield, N.J., grad. Harvard, 1908. His first book, The Wine of the Puritans (1909), presented the thesis that American culture has been so pervaded by puritanism with its materialistic emphasis that the artistic side of the nation's life has been profoundly neglected. Although this theme was developed in such subsequent books as America's Coming-of-Age (1915), The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), and The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), later works, including Emerson and Others (1927), indicate his growing respect for American literature. In 1937 he won the Pulitzer Prize in history for The Flowering of New England (1936). Other volumes followed in the series he called Makers and Finders: New England: Indian Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), and The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947). In this series, his masterwork, Brooks interprets American literary history; it is a vivid, varied chronicle, rich in anecdote and infused with the author's humanism. Among Brooks's innumerable other books are such autobiographical works as Days of Phoenix (1957), From a Writer's Notebook (1958), and An Autobiography (1965).

Bibliography: See The Van Wyck Brooks-Lewis Mumford Letters, ed. by R. E. Spiller (1970).