Although most of those ideas derived from a self-conscious nationalism and an emphasis on the artist's personality that was at odds with the more formalist tastes and international context of Modernist aesthetics, for many readers Brooks's wide learning and intellectual independence represented not only the possibility of a genuine "American" culture but also one of its founding monuments.
Brooks was born on 16 February 1886 in Plainfield, New Jersey, a wealthy community of financiers and businessmen that Brooks described as a "Wall Street suburb." His father, Charles Edward Brooks, had spent ten years in Europe as a junior partner in a mining firm, where he had developed an interest in European culture that he would pass on to his children. In 1882 he had returned to the United States and gone into business for himself as a speculator in Western mines. In June 1882 he had married the wealthy young Plainfield socialite Sallie Bailey Ames; their first son, Charles Ames Brooks, was born in 1883. By the time Van Wyck Brooks was born, Charles Edward Brooks's health was poor and his business had begun to deteriorate.
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