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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Van Wyck Brooks


(born Feb. 16, 1886, Plainfield, N.J., U.S. — died May 2, 1963, Bridgewater, Conn.) U.S. critic, biographer, and literary historian. Brooks attended Harvard University. His Finders and Makers series, tracing American literary history in rich biographical detail from 1800 to 1915, includes The Flowering of New England, 1815 – 1865 (1936, Pulitzer Prize); New England: Indian Summer, 1865 – 1915 (1940); The World of Washington Irving (1944); The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947); and The Confident Years: 1885 – 1915 (1952).

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Brooks, Van Wyck
(văn wĭk') , 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).

 
Dictionary: Brooks, Van Wyck
1886–1963.

American literary historian, critic, and translator who wrote many books on the literary history of America, including The Flowering of New England (1936), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize.


 
Works: Works by Van Wyck Brooks
(1886-1963)

1909The Wine of the Puritans. Brooks's first critical book sets forth one of his dominating themes--the impact of Puritanism on the formation of American ideas and culture. Brooks, one of the twentieth century's major American literary critics, would produce critical biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James and his multipart Finders and Makers series of literary and cultural history.
1915America's Coming-of-Age. Brooks's analysis of American literary culture establishes a dichotomy between the highbrows, idealists who remain aloof from American realities, and the lowbrows, vulgar materialists. He uses this split to explain the failure of American culture, with Whitman as an example of a writer who bridged the gap. The book establishes Brooks's reputation as one of the leading literary and cultural critics of the period.
1920The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Brooks's groundbreaking psychological assessment of Twain's character and career helps establish a view of the author that has dominated subsequent biographical and critical debate. As Brooks asserts, "The main idea in the book is that Mark Twain's career was a tragedy--a tragedy for himself and a tragedy for mankind."
1925The Pilgrimage of Henry James. In contrast to his thesis in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), which asserts the cost of Twain's accepting the confines of American society, Brooks looks at the cost James paid for trying to escape those same confines by living in Europe. The Life of Emerson (1932) would present a positive synthesis of the two positions.
1936The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865. The first of the author's Makers and Finders series of literary and cultural histories of the United States wins the Pulitzer Prize. It looks at the social, political, and religious context of the careers of writers such as Longfellow, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau.
1940New England Indian Summer: 1865-1915. The second of the author's Makers and Finders series on American culture is an anecdotally rich, impressionistic view of the American literary scene in the postbellum period. Brooks's clarity and vivid style help produce one of the rarest of successes: literary criticism on the bestseller list.
1941On Literature Today. Brooks delivers a harsh assessment of the perceived cynicism of writers such as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, calling for a literature of affirmation rooted in "health, will, courage, and faith in human nature." The same themes are sounded in the author's other 1941 volume of criticism, Opinions of Oliver Allston.
1944The World of Washington Irving. A continuation of the author's masterly Makers and Finders series on American literary history. This volume covers the nation beyond New England in the period 1800 to 1840.
1947The Time of Melville and Whitman. The fourth of the critic's Makers and Finders series on writers in America covers the period from the 1840s to the 1880s.
1952The Confident Years. In the final volume of his masterful Makers and Finders series of American cultural and literary history, Brooks treats the period 1885-1915, completing his one-hundred-year survey.
1953The Writer in America. Brooks responds to criticism that his literary histories fail to discriminate between important and lesser writers on the basis of literary skill. He argues that "The main interest of American literature resides in other aspects than the purely aesthetic" and that "biography and social analysis are an indispensable part of literary history."

 
Quotes By: Van Wyck Brooks

Quotes:

"Nothing is so soothing to our self esteem as to find our bad traits in our forebears. It seems to absolve us."

"A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man. The instructed man is ashamed to pronounce in an orphic manner what everybody knows, and because he is silent people think he is making fun of them. They like a man who expresses their own superficial thoughts in a manner that appears to be profound. This enables them to feel that they are themselves profound."

 
Wikipedia: Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks (b. Plainfield, New Jersey, February 16 1886; d. Bridgewater, Connecticut, May 2 1963) was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian. Brooks was educated at Harvard University and graduated in 1908. The masterpiece of his literary career was a series of studies entitled Makers and Finders, which chronicled the development of American literature during the long 19th century. Brooks' reputation rested on the dexterity with which he embroidered elaborate biographical detail into brilliant anecdotal prose. In 1937, Brooks received the Pulitzer Prize in history for The Flowering of New England.

He was a long-time resident of Bridgewater, Connecticut, which built a town library wing in his name. Although a decade-long fund-raising effort seemed to fail and was abandoned in 1972, a miserly hermit in Los Angeles with no connection to Bridgewater surprised the town by leaving money for the library in his will. With $210,000 raised, the library addition went up in 1980.[1]

Among his works, the book The Ordeal of Mark Twain, published in 1920, analyzes the literary progression of Samuel L. Clemens and attributes shortcomings, which are debatable, to Clemens' mother and wife.

In 2002 the Burnahm School 5th Grade class made a movie about the history of Bridgewater in the enrichment class. It mentions Brooks and is set on location at his Bridgewater home.

References

  1. ^ [1] Burnham Public Library Web site, Library History Web page, accessed July 23, 2006

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Van Wyck Brooks".  Read more

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