Vernon Louis Parrington

Vernon Louis Parrington (born August 3, 1871 in Aurora , Illinois ; died June 16, 1929 in Winchcombe , Gloucestershire , England ) was an American historian and literary scholar. His main work Main Currents in American Thought , published 1927–1930, is still considered a milestone in the history of American ideas and is one of the “founding texts” of American studies .

Life

Parrington grew up in the rural Midwest of the USA, first in Aurora (Illinois) , then from 1877 in Kansas . From 1888 he attended college in the small town of Emporia , where his father was a probate judge. In 1891 he was able to move to the renowned Harvard University with the help of a $ 150 scholarship . There he took courses in English literary history, including with Barrett Wendell (1855-1921). In 1893 he graduated with a BA and returned to Emporia, where he initially taught English and French and organized the establishment of the faculty for English language and literature.

In 1897 he moved to the University of Oklahoma , where he was chairman and only member of the English faculty until 1903; from 1897 to 1900 he was also the coach of the university's football team . In 1908 Parrington, along with a few other professors, fell victim to what is now the notorious "purge": conservative Christian circles, in particular the local Southern Methodist Church, had gained influence over the university administration and obtained the dismissal of overly "liberal" lecturers, especially those who liked tobacco and alcohol talked and enjoyed themselves at dance parties. Parrington was guilty of all these vices and was released without notice.

He moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was to remain in the English department until his death. Even in later years, when Parrington had built up an academic reputation and more prestigious universities wanted to poach him, he remained steadfast - especially because he harbored a pronounced aversion to the established literature and university business on the east coast. This aversion increased in 1908 when, after his release in Oklahoma, Harvard University denied him admission to a doctorate because he was found to be too old. He also regularly stayed away from the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association , the umbrella organization for American philologists. Instead, he devoted himself to teaching at his provincial university with great commitment. The number of his publications up to 1927 is manageable: in 1921 he wrote an essay on James Branch Cabell for the Pacific Review , in 1926 an introduction to an anthology of the works of the Connecticut Wits and in 1927 a short monograph on Sinclair Lewis ; In 1920 he contributed two chapters to the Cambridge History of English and American Literature ( Hawthorne and American Literature ).

The American literary scene was all the more surprising when in 1927 the first two volumes of Parrington's groundbreaking work Main Currents in American Thought were published. Since his time in Oklahoma, Parrington had dealt increasingly with the American history of ideas and literature and collected material for a survey on this topic. After several publishers had rejected the publication, Van Wyck Brooks , at the time editor for the renowned publisher Harcourt Brace , sifted through the manuscript, recognized its quality and signed Parrington. The volumes received rave reviews and were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 .

Parrington traveled to England with his family in 1929 to escape the sudden hype about himself and to complete the last volume of the Main Currents in the rural seclusion of a Gloucestershire village . On June 16 of that year he died of a heart attack. The staff at his faculty in Washington compiled the third and final volume from his manuscripts; it appeared posthumously in 1930.

Main Currents in American Thought

His main work, Main Currents in American Thought, is still considered a standard work on the history of American ideas. Parrington's interpretation of American literary history gave American studies a methodological and ideological framework that shaped this discipline for decades. Parrington sought to show the essential traits of the alleged American national character - idealism, liberalism, individualism - in the country's literature. One focus of the Main Currents is the competition between two political currents in the early years of the republic, Alexander Hamilton's elitism and Thomas Jefferson's egalitarian concept of society and the state, with Parrington firmly advocating the latter.

literature

Works

• The Connecticut Wits (1926)
• Sinclair Lewis, Our Own Diogenes (1927)
• Main Currents in American Thought, An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 , 3 volumes 1927–1930 ( digitized ).
  • Vol. 1: 1620-1800, The Colonial Mind . Harcourt Brace & Co., New York 1927.
  • Vol. 2: 1800-1860, The Romantic Revolution in America . Harcourt Brace & Co., New York 1927.
  • Vol. 3: 1860-1920, The Beginnings of Critical Realism , completed by EH Eby. Harcourt Brace & Co., New York 1930.

Secondary literature

• Richard Hofstadter : The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington . Knopf, New York 1968.