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 Ha...
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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...
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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...
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Critical Essay by W[alter] L[ippmann]
[America's Coming of Age] is one of the books which worry the reviewer and delight the reader. It cannot be summarized. To attempt to summarize it would be...
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Critical Essay by William Lyon Phelps
Many books have been written about Mark Twain; but with the exception of Paine's biography—perhaps the best biography ever written by an American&#x...
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Critical Essay by Bernard Devoto
[In The Ordeal of Mark Twain] Mr. Brooks proposed a Portrait of the American as Artist. The effort was to include three principal exhibits, which would establish categ...
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Critical Essay by Edmund Wilson
Van Wyck Brooks has now suffered the fate of many a good writer before him. Beginning as an opposition critic, read by a minority of the public, he has lived to become ...
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Critical Essay by RenÉ Wellek
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 observa...
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Critical Essay by F. R. Leavis
Whatever may be Mr Van Wyck Brooks's distinctive mark in the contemporary American literary world, the five-volume work that comes to a close with The Confident Y...
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Critical Essay by Leon Edel
[An Autobiography is] a luminous testament of one of the most dedicated literary careers in our century.
What emerges from the reticent and at times almost impersonal sketc...
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Critical Essay by William Wasserstrom
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 re...
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Critical Essay by Raymond Nelson
Makers and Finders is a romantic history shaped according to the familiar liberal analysis that divides American society between the progressive, democratic values bes...
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Van Wyck Brooks
