Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks (born February 16, 1886 in Plainfield , New Jersey , † May 2, 1963 in Bridgewater , Connecticut ) was an American literary critic and historian who awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1937 for his work The Flowering of New England got.

Early years

Van Wyck Brooks was born on February 16, 1886 in Plainfield, New Jersey, the second son of Charles and Sallie Brooks. He attended local schools and was trained for a year in Europe in 1898, where he briefly moved with his family.

From 1904 to 1907 he studied literature and philosophy at Harvard University . During an eighteen month stay in England, he wrote his first book The Wine of the Puritans in 1908 . He married his first wife, Eleanor Kenyon Stimson , in California in 1911 .

Professional background

Between 1911 and 1913 he was an English teacher at Stanford University and in 1914 worked as a French translator for the Century Company in New York City . In 1916 and 1917 Van Wyck Brooks was co-editor of The Seven Arts magazine, and from 1920 he began a five-year tenure as co-editor of Freeman . After its bankruptcy, he took a job at Harcourt Brace & Company .

Career as a critic

In his first work, Brooks argued that American culture, permeated by Puritanism , suppressed the artistic aspects of life. This theme runs through other of his works, such as America's Coming-of-Age (1915). With The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) Brooks published a book in which he tried to prove psychoanalytically that Mark Twain mutilated himself emotionally, which would have been due to the suppression of his artistic tendencies in favor of his Calvinist upbringing. This work, in turn, received a lot of criticism from Brooks' colleagues such as Bernard DeVoto . After the publication of The Pilgrimage of Henry James in 1925, Van Wyck Brooks suffered a nervous breakdown and had to interrupt his activities for seven years.

After he started writing again, his works had a far more moderate tone and had lost much of their radical attitude. Rather, for Brooks the values ​​of Ralph Waldo Emerson were considered worth striving for and he was thus against the rather pessimistic characteristics of modern literature, represented by James Joyce , Ezra Pound and TS Eliot . This change in the direction of Brooks' criticism was evident in the series Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800–1915 , which was published between 1936 and 1952 and from which Otto Bettmann 1956 provided one with 500 illustrations created a sixth abbreviated version Our literary heritage . Although he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1937, it is more his early work that has gained recognition from other critics.

Death and legacy

Van Wyck Brooks died on May 2, 1963 in Bridgewater, Connecticut, where he had lived for many years. He was buried in the local Center Cemetery . The Burnham Library wing, completed in 1980, was named after him in his honor. The University of Bridgeport donated the Van Wyck Brooks Award in his honor .

Works (selection)

• 1908: The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America
• 1913: The Malady of the Ideal: Senacour, Maurice de Guérin, and Amiel
• 1920: The Ordeal of Mark Twain
• 1925: The Pilgrimage of Henry James
• 1932: The Life of Emerson
• 1936: The Flowering of New England
• 1947: The Times of Melville and Whitman
• 1956: Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait
• 1956 with Otto Bettmann: Our literary heritage; a pictorial history of the writer in America

Prizes and awards

• 1923: Record by the literary critic magazine Dial in the Distinguished Critical Work category
• 1937: Pulitzer Prize for History
• 1938: Gold Medal from the Limited Editions Club
• 1944: Carey Thomas Award to publisher EP Dutton for Brooks' book The World of Washington Irving
• 1946: Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now American Academy of Arts and Letters )
• 1953: Theodore Roosevelt Distinguished Service Medal
• 1954: Huntington Hartford Foundation Award
• 1957: Secondary Education Board Award for Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait

Honorary doctorates

Doctor of Letters :

• Boston University
• Bowdoin College
• Columbia University
• Dartmouth College
• Fairleigh Dickinson University
• Harvard University
• Northeastern Illinois University
• Tufts University
• Union College
• University of Pennsylvania

Doctor of Humane Letters :

• Northwestern University

Memberships

• American Philosophical Society (1939)
• American Academy of Arts and Letters (1925)
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1949)
• Century Association
• The Players
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

literature

• Casey Nelson Blake: Beloved Community. The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill NC et al. 1990, ISBN 0-8078-4296-6 .
• James Hoopes: Van Wyck Brooks. In search of American culture. University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst MA 1977, ISBN 0-87023-212-6 .
• William Wasserstrom: Van Wyck Brooks (= University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers. No. 71, ISSN  0544-3288 ). University of Minnesota Press et al., Minneapolis MN 1968.

Web links

• Brief review of The Wine of the Puritans in the New York Times, December 25, 1909
• William H. Prichard: Not to write was not to be alive , in: New York Times, November 1, 1981