Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren

Mark Van Doren (born June 13, 1894 in Hope , Illinois , † December 10, 1972 in Torrington , Connecticut ) was an American literary critic , professor and poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1940 .

Life

Teaching

After attending school, Van Doren studied at the University of Illinois and completed this course in 1914 with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) before completing a subsequent postgraduate course there in 1915 with a Master of Arts (MA). In 1920 he earned a Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) at Columbia University with a dissertation on the poems of John Dryden , which appeared in 1920 under the title The Poetry of John Dryden .

He then accepted a professorship for English at Columbia University in 1920, which he held for nearly forty years until his retirement in 1959. His students included Robert Lax and David Medalla , among others .

In addition to this teaching activity, he was also editor for literature from 1924 to 1928 at The Nation , the oldest weekly magazine in the United States.

Writing career and awards

At this time he began his career as a poet and published his first novel , The Transients , in addition to the anthologies Spring Thunder (1924), Jonathan Gentry (1931) and Winter Diary (1935) . He also wrote in 1927 another reference book about the diary of Samuel Sewall entitled Samuel Sewall's Diary . After a book on William Shakespeare ( Shakespeare (1939)), he published the collection of poems Collected Poems in 1939 , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1940.

After two further novels with the titles Windless Cabins (1940) and Tilda (1943) and the anthology The Mayfield Deer (1941), several specialist books on literary criticism and literary studies such as The Noble Voice (1946), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949) and Introduction to Poetry were published (1951).

After his last volume of poetry, The Last Days of Lincoln (1959), he again received wide attention through the book The Happy Critic (1961). In 1963 he was also awarded the Emerson - Henry David Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters . Since 1940 he was an elected member of this academy.

In addition, since 1962, Columbia University students have awarded the Mark Van Doren Prize to outstanding university teachers in his honor .

family

Van Doren is the father of the literary professor Charles Van Doren , who went down in American television history in 1957 as a candidate for the quiz show Twenty-One and was the model for the 1994 movie Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford . In this Paul Scofield played the role of Mark Van Doren.

His older brother was the literary critic and scholar Carl Van Doren , who also received a Pulitzer Prize in 1939 in the biography or autobiography category for a biography of Benjamin Franklin .

Works

poetry

• Spring Thunder (1924)
• (Ed.): An Anthology of World Poetry (1928)
• (Ed.): Jonathan Gentry (1931)
• (Ed.): The Oxford Book of American Prose (1932)
• Winter Diary (1935)
• Collected Poems 1922-1938 (1939)
• The Mayfield Deer (1941)
• Selected Poems (1954)
• Our Lady Peace
• The story plate
• Collected and New Poems 1924-1963 (1963)

drama

• The Last Days of Lincoln (1959)

Novels

• The Transients (1935)
• Windless Cabins (1940)
• Tilda (1943)

Short stories

• Nobody Say a Word (1954)

Literary criticism and other prose

• Henry David Thoreau: A Critical Study . Houghton Mifflin Co., New York and Boston 1916.
• The Poetry of John Dryden . Harcourt, Brace and Howe, New York 1920.
• The Ordeal of Mark Twain . EP Dutton, New York 1920.
• Introduction to Bartram's Travels (1928)
• An Autobiography of America (1929)
• American Poets, 1630-1930 (1932)
• (with Carl Van Doren): American and British Literature Since 1890 (1939)
• Shakespeare (1939)
• The Liberal Education (1943)
• The Night of the Summer Solstice: & Other Stories of the Russian War (1943)
• The Noble Voice (1946)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949)
• Introduction to Poetry (1951)
• The Autobiography Of Mark Van Doren (1958)
• The Happy Critic (1961)
• Mark Van Doren on Great Poems of Western Literature (1962)
• George Hendrick (ed.): The Selected Letters of Mark Van Doren . Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge 1987. ISBN 0807113174 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Mark Van Doren in the catalog of the German National Library
• Mark Van Doren in the nndb (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Mark Van Doren. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed May 1, 2019 .