Van Wyck Brooks

From Philosopedia

Brooks, Van Wyck (16 February 1886 - 2 May 1963)

Brooks, who was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, became a noted American literary critic, biographer, and historian. A graduate of Harvard in 1908, he wrote The Wine of the Puritans (1909), in which he made the point that American culture has a background of puritanism with a powerfully materialistic emphasis, and that the arts have woefully been neglected. That view was also found in his America's Coming Of Age (1915), The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920), and The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925). He also wrote Emerson and Others (1927), stating the importance of American literature as compared with foreign works.

In 1937 he won the Pulitzer Prize in history for The Flowering of New England (1936). Other volumes followed in the series he called Makers and Finders: New England: Indian Summer (1940), The World of Washington Irving (1944), and The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947). He also wrote such autobiographical works as Days of Phoenix (1957), From a Writer's Notebook (1958), and An Autobiography (1965).

Corresponding with Warren Allen Smith in 1951 and 1956, the distinguished member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters wrote about the various connotations of humanism:

I find myself in the closest possible agreement with the statement of “The Beliefs of Humanists” in a leaflet, “Concerning the American Humanist Association.”

Five years later, he also wrote,

I would like to add the following quotation from Santayana’s The Genteel Tradition at Bay as further defining my position: “Why is naturalism supposed to be favorable to the lower sides of human nature? Are not the higher sides just as natural?”

{CE; CL; HNS; WAS, 20 February 1951 and 13 April 1956}