The second son of Sarah Bailey Ames, a social favorite in Plainfield, and Charles Edward Brooks, a lover of art and music soon to become a business failure, Van Wyck experienced both the social status of the leisured upper class and the economic insecurities of the middle class. Convinced that America's emphasis on commerce destroyed artistic sensibility, Brooks blamed the life of a businessman for his father's numerous illnesses and lack of success. Later Van Wyck attributed the suicide of his brother, Charles Ames Brooks, a lawyer who commuted from Plainfield to New York, to the harshness of the business world. As children both brothers had shared their father's interest in the arts; Van Wyck felt that the poet in his brother had not been able to survive exposure to the Wall Street inferno.
Unlike his brother, Van Wyck chose to stay true to the poet in himself, although after a youthful attempt at writing poetry he turned his talents to criticism rather than verse. Considering Harvard the best university to prepare him for a career as a writer, he headed to Cambridge in the fall of 1904, a year behind his boyhood friend, Maxwell Perkins.
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