Brooks, Van Wyck

Brooks, Van Wyck

(1886–1963) literary critic, biographer; born in Plainfield, N.J. Harvard educated, he emerged as America's most influential cultural and literary critic of the 1930s and 1940s after establishing his reputation with America's Coming of Age (1915) and biographies of Mark Twain, Henry James and Emerson. Brooks interpreted the American literary tradition for a wide audience in his prizewinning and influential 5-volume Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America (1936–52).

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Brooks, Van Wyck

 

Born Feb. 16, 1886, in Plainfield, N. J.; died May 2, 1963, in New York. American literary scholar.

In 1915, Brooks published the book America’s Coming-of-Age. Close to the cultural-historical and sociological school, Brooks spoke out against decadent literature. In the book The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) he developed the idea of a conflict between the artist and capitalist civilization, and he devoted the book The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) to this theme. In the works The Flowering of New England (1936), New England: Indian Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947), and The Confident Years (1952), Brooks presented a broad panorama of American literature. In the books The Writer in America (1953), Days of the Phoenix (1957), and From a Writer’s Notebook (1958), he condemned modern formalistic tendencies, including the “new criticism.” In Howells: A Biography (1959), Brooks wrote about the influence of socialist ideas and Russian authors (L. N. Tolstoy and I. S. Turgenev) on W. D. Howells.

WORKS

Opinions of Oliver Allston. New York, 1944.
Helen Keller. London, 1956.
In Russian translation:
Pisatel’ i amerikanskaia zhizn’, vol. 1. Moscow, 1967. Vol. 2: Moscow, 1971.

REFERENCES

Mendel’son, M. “Van Vik Bruks i demokraticheskie traditsii amerikanskogo literaturovedeniia.” In Sovremennoe literaturovedenie SShA. Moscow, 1969.
Vitelli, J. R. Van Wyck Brooks. New York, 1969.

B. A. GILENSON

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.