For over half a century Van Wyck Brooks devoted himself to understanding and shaping American culture. His career is divided in two. In the first part he was one of the most important cultural critics of the progressive era, looked to by American...

In the years between World War I and World War II Van Wyck Brooks was one of the most important intellectual leaders in the United States, lrving Howe dated the beginnings of modern criticism from the publication of Brooks's America's Coming-of-Age in...

During his undergraduate years at Harvard, Van Wyck Brooks had ambitions of becoming a poet. His poetry appeared regularly in the Harvard Advocate, and in 1905, he and another aspiring writer, John Hall Wheelock, privately published a small volume of...

The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 01-25-1996 AVOIDING THE VAN WYCK Date: 01-25-1996, Thursday Section: OPINION Edition: All Editions -- 3 Star, 2 Star P, 2 Star B, 1 Star Late, 1 Star Early THE latest expansion of Newark Airport is a boon...

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When I was in this country for the first time, some time in 1928, I read Van Wyck Brooks' America's Coming-of-Age and admired his penetrating observations on the literary conditions of America and his trenchant criticisms of many of the main authors of nineteenth-century America. I, as a Czech, relished the strongly critical attitude of Mr. Brooks to his own literature, as I myself had grown up in a similar critical atmosphere, which reacted against the idols and ideals of the nineteenth centu...

Makers and Finders is a romantic history shaped according to the familiar liberal analysis that divides American society between the progressive, democratic values best represented by Thomas Jefferson and the aristocratic reaction represented by Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists. That interpretation has been influential during much of this century, and Brooks might have had it most directly from Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought (1927–1930), among any number of othe...

The displacement of Van Wyck Brooks from the center to the farthest margins of literary influence today is surely a stunning shift of taste. In 1920 Brooks was regarded as the undisputed heir of the great tradition in American thought—the radical, reformist, prophetic, "organic" tradition which adopted Emerson as its source of inspiration, took The American Scholar as its point of departure, and envisioned as its point of terminus a civilization in which the creative spirit, in all its ...