(1897-1955)

1932	Mark Twain's America. DeVoto challenges Van Wyck Brooks's contention in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) that the writer was a frustrated, limited figure. The Idaho-born professor at Northwestern (1922-1927) and Harvard (1929-1936) asserts Twain's achievement as a frontier humorist who opened up American life for literature.
1943	The Year of Decision: 1846. The first of an eventual trilogy on the western experience and American culture. Subsequent volumes are Across the Wide Missouri (1947) and The Course of Empire (1952).
1944	The Literary Fallacy. The critic and scholar takes aim at the literature of the 1920s, condemning writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner for ignoring common life, "the experience that alone gives life and validity to literature."
1947	Across the Wide Missouri. The second of the author's studies on the impact of the West on American culture chronicles the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. It wins the Pulitzer Prize in history.
1952	The Course of Empire. The last installment of DeVoto's trilogy about the significance of the American West addresses westward exploration from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The first volume, The Year of Decision (1947), concerns the Mexican War. The second, Across the Wide Missouri (1947), an examination of the fur trade, won a Pulitzer Prize. DeVoto would consider the trilogy his most significant accomplishment.

Quotes:

"The trouble with the sacred Individual is that he has no significance, except as he can acquire it from others, from the social whole."

"The mind has its own logic but does not often let others in on it."

"The trouble with Reason is that it becomes meaningless at the exact point where it refuses to act."

"Sure the people are stupid: the human race is stupid. Sure Congress is an inefficient instrument of government. But the people are not stupid enough to abandon representative government for any other kind, including government by the guy who knows."