Bernard DeVoto
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| Bernard DeVoto | |
|---|---|
| Born | Bernard Augustine DeVoto 11 January 1897 Ogden, Utah |
| Died | 13 November 1955 (aged 58) New York City, New York |
| Occupation | Historian, Author |
| Genres | History |
Bernard Augustine DeVoto (January 11, 1897 – November 13, 1955) was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.
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[edit] Life and work
He was born in Ogden, Utah. He attended the University of Utah for one year, then transferred to Harvard University, but interrupted his education to serve in World War I, graduating in 1920.
He began his career in 1922 as an English instructor at Northwestern University and began to write articles and novels, which often provoked controversy for their liberal viewpoint. Sometimes he used the pseudonyms "John August" and "Cady Hewes." In 1927, DeVoto resigned from Northwestern and moved to Massachusetts with his wife Avis. He began to dedicate himself to serious writing along with part-time instructing at Harvard. He wrote frequent articles for periodicals, with a regular column, "The Easy Chair," in Harper's Magazine from 1935 until his death.
DeVoto became an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Twain's papers. From 1936 to 1938 he lived in New York City, where he was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, after which he returned to Massachusetts.
In 1936, DeVoto published "Genius is Not Enough," a review of Thomas Wolfe's The Story of a Novel (1936), in which he wrote that Wolfe's work was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners."[1] The effect of this essay on Wolfe's self-confidence was perhaps the greatest influence on his cutting ties with Scribners and editor Maxwell Perkins shortly before his death in 1938.[2]
In DeVoto's later years, he gained fame for his popular histories of the West: The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri in 1947 (Pulitzer Prize, 1948), The Course of Empire in 1952 (National Book Award, 1953), and DeVoto's popular abridged edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). From the 1940s to the end of his life, he was renowned for his championing of public lands and of conservation of natural resources, and for his pugnacious defense of civil liberties.
His wife, Avis DeVoto, a book reviewer, editor, and avid cook, became friends with famous American cookbook author Julia Child after Child wrote a fan letter to Bernard DeVoto regarding an article that he had written in Harper's Magazine about how he detested stainless steel knives, because she thought he was "100% right". Avis's response began a long correspondence and friendship between the two women during Child's work on her groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Child acknowledged Avis as "wet nurse" and "mentor" to the undertaking. Their correspondence is held in the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, and selections appeared in the book, As Always, Julia (2010)[3]
His and Avis' son Mark DeVoto is a music theorist, composer, and retired professor at Tufts University.
[edit] Selected works
- Mark Twain's America (1932)
- We Accept With Pleasure (1934)
- Mark Twain in Eruption (1940)
- Mark Twain at Work (1942)
- The year of decision, 1846. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 490177177a. (1942)
- The Literary Fallacy (1944)
- The Portable Mark Twain (1946)
- Across the Wide Missouri (1947)
- The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto (1948)[4]
- The World of Fiction (1950)
- The Course of Empire (1952)
- The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953, editor)
- DeVoto's West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good (2002, edited by Edward K. Muller)
[edit] Notes
- ^ David H. Donald, Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe (NY: Fawcett Columbine, 1987), 376-7
- ^ Berg, A. Scott (1978). Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius. Berkley.
- ^ Edited by Joan Reardon, and published by Houghton Mifflin which originally rejected Child's cookbook.
- ^ Republished in 2010 by Tin House Books
[edit] Sources
- Stegner, Wallace E., The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974)
- Stegner, Wallace E., ed., The Letters of Bernard DeVoto (1975)
- Topping, Gary. Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), ISBN 0-8061-3561-1
- Saveur Magazine, #134, December 2010, p. 41.
[edit] External links
- Works by or about Bernard DeVoto in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Utah History: Bernard DeVoto
- "FBI was out to get freethinking DeVoto", from High Country News
- Bernard DeVoto
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