Van Wyck Brooks (February 16, 1886 - May 2, 1963) was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.
Franklin Library Van Wyck Brooks books
The Flowering of New England - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1979
The Flowering of New England - Pulitzer Prize Classics - 1985
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Van Wyck Brooks 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. 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.
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 1944, Brooks was on the cover of Time Magazine.
Van Wyck Brooks books in order
Verses by Two Undergraduates (with John Hall Wheelock - 1905)
The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America (1908)
The Malady of the Ideal: Senancour, Maurice de Guérin, and Amiel (1913)
John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study (1914)
The World of H.G. Wells (1915)
America's Coming of Age (1915)
The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920)
The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925)
The Life of Emerson (1932)
Three Essays on America (1934)
The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936)
New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940)
Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941)
On Literature Today (1941)
The World of Washington Irving (1944)
The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947)
A Chilmark Miscellany (1948)
The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (1952)
Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915 (1952)
The Writer in America (1953)
Scenes and Portraits: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (An Autobiography - 1954)
John Sloan: A Painter's Life (1955)
Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait (1956)
Days of the Phoenix: The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember (An Autobiography - 1957)
The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915 (1958)
From a Writer's Notebook (1958)
Howells: His Life and World (1959)
From the Shadow of the Mountain: My Post-Meridian Years (An Autobiography - 1961)
Fenollosa and His Circle: With Other Essays in Biography (1962)
An Autobiography 1965)
Source and additional information: Van Wyck Brooks