Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks (born Feb. 16, 1886, Plainfield, N.J., U.S.—died May 2, 1963, Bridgewater, Conn.) was an American critic, biographer, and literary historian, whose “Finders and Makers” series traces American literary history in rich biographical detail from 1800 to 1915.

Brooks grew up in the wealthy suburb of Plainfield. Graduating from Harvard in 1907, Brooks went to England, where, while working as a journalist, he published his first book, The Wine of the Puritans (1908), in which he blamed the Puritan heritage for America’s cultural shortcomings. He explored this theme more thoroughly in his first major work, America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), which made a strong impact with its thesis that the Puritan duality that separated spiritual and money matters had resulted in a corresponding split in contemporary American culture between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” publics, neither of which was helpful to the writer.

Brooks’s book The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920; rev. ed., 1933) was a psychological study attempting to show that Twain had crippled himself emotionally and curtailed his genius by repressing his natural artistic bent for the sake of his Calvinist upbringing. In The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925), Brooks took a stand against expatriation, arguing that James’s later writing was convoluted and inferior because of his too-long separation from his native land. Brooks suffered a mental breakdown from 1927 to 1931. The Life of Emerson (1932), largely written before his collapse, was edited by his friend Lewis Mumford. In Emerson, Brooks found an American writer who had successfully bridged the gap between art and life.

The “Finders and Makers” series began with The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (1936), followed by 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). Criticized by some for seeking in this series a mainstream, essentially middlebrow, cultural tradition free from contradictions and conflicts, Brooks wrote The Writer in America (1953) to justify his position.