Van Wyck Brooks

Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks by John Butler Yeats, 1909

Van Wyck Brooks (b. Plainfield, New Jersey, February 16, 1886; d. Bridgewater, Connecticut, May 2, 1963) was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.

Biography

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. For The Flowering of New England (1936), he won the second National Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Book Sellers Association and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize in history.

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.

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 1953 he published his excellent translation from French of the 1920 biography of Henry Thoreau by Leon Bazalgette titled "Henry Thoreau Bachelor of Nature".

In 1944, Brooks was on the cover of Time Magazine.

Bibliography

• 1908: The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America
• 1913: The Malady of the Ideal: Senancour, Maurice de Guérin, and Amiel
• 1914: John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study
• 1915: The World of H.G. Wells
• 1915: America's Coming of Age
• 1920: The Ordeal of Mark Twain
• 1925: The Pilgrimage of Henry James
• 1932: The Life of Emerson
• 1934: Three Essays on America
• 1936: The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (Makers and Finders)
• 1940: New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1914 (Makers and Finders)
• 1941: Opinions of Oliver Allston
• 1941: On Literature Today
• 1944: The World of Washington Irving (Makers and Finders)
• 1947: The Times of Melville and Whitman (Makers and Finders)
• 1948: A Chilmark Miscellany
• 1952: The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (Makers and Finders)
• 1952: Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915
• 1953: The Writer in America
• 1953: Henry Thoreau Bachelor of Nature by Leon Bazalgette-translated by Van Wyck Brooks
• 1954: Scenes and Portraits: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (An Autobiography)
• 1955: John Sloan: A Painter's Life
• 1956: Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait
• 1957: Days of the Phoenix: The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember (An Autobiography)
• 1958: The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915
• 1958: From a Writer's Notebook
• 1959: Howells: His Life and World
• 1961: From the Shadow of the Mountain: My Post-Meridian Years (An Autobiography)
• 1962: Fenollosa and His Circle: With Other Essays in Biography
• 1965: An Autobiography

Awards & honors

Prizes

• 1937: Pulitzer Prize in history and National Book Award for 1936 nonfiction
• 1938: Goldmedaille des Limited Editions Club
• 1944: Carey Thomas Award for The World of Washington Irving
• 1946: Goldmedal of National Institute of Arts and Letters (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 degrees

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