Vernon L. Parrington

Vernon L. Parrington (born Aug. 3, 1871, Aurora, Ill., U.S.—died June 16, 1929, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, Eng.) was an American literary historian and teacher noted for his far-reaching appraisal of American literary history.

Parrington grew up in Emporia, Kan., and was educated at the College of Emporia and Harvard University. He taught English and modern languages at the College of Emporia (1893–97), at the University of Oklahoma, Norman (1897–1908), and at the University of Washington, Seattle (1908–29). Parrington’s major work on American literature was published in Main Currents in American Thought, 2 vol. (1927), which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1928. A third volume with the subtitle The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, incomplete at his death, was edited by E.H. Eby and was published in 1930. Parrington, a Jeffersonian liberal, interpreted the history of American literature in light of the concept of democratic idealism, which he saw as a characteristic American idea. He also wrote The Connecticut Wits (1926) and Sinclair Lewis, Our Own Diogenes (1927).