American · 1886–1963
Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) was an American literary critic, biographer and historian. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, he graduated from Harvard in 1908 and began his career with essays and books that criticised American culture for dividing practical business life from the life of the mind. America's Coming-of-Age (1915) and The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) made him a leading voice among younger critics. He edited The Freeman and wrote for The Seven Arts. After a breakdown in the 1920s, he turned from criticism to a large cultural history, Makers and Finders, in five volumes. Its first volume, The Flowering of New England (1936), won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1937. He also wrote biographies of Emerson, Henry James and John Sloan, and several memoirs. His later, warmer view of American writers drew attacks from younger critics, but his work shaped how a generation read the American literary past.