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 ...

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 a popular author, read by immense numbers of people and awarded a Pulitzer prize—with the result that the ordinary reviewers are praising him indiscriminately and the highbrows are trying to drop him. (p. 10) Let me begin then by stating some of the objections which are being made to Brooks's books on New England by those reader...

[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 categories capable of holding all other specimens. There would be the Artist as adaptation to environment: Mark Twain. There would be the Artist as flight from environment: Henry James. There would be the Artist as expression or summation of environment: Ralph Waldo Emerson. The second and third of these exhibits are not relevant here but [one] eff...

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 Years seems to me to be in an essential respect very representative—representative, I mean, of a prevailing climate: while it is, to a portentous tune, inflationary in tendency, it at the same time shows an indifference to the real American achievement. The indifference must be judged to be unawareness, and if one asks how such unaware...

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—this work ["The Ordeal of Mark Twain"] by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks is the most important and the most essential. Mr. Brooks is one of our ablest critics, for he combines catholicity of taste with an almost austere sincerity. His book, like all books filled with ideas, is a challenge; it contains so much truth that it provokes and dist...

[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 about as just to the author as trying to dry a jelly-fish over a fire. The summary would omit too much of the life of the creature. Nor is the book an argument, which can be accepted, or refuted and left for dead. It is gifted conversation, a sort of high comment, a little more deliberate than table-talk, more artful than journalism, yet free of p...

[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 sketches of his boyhood and youth, his days at Harvard, his uneasy flirtation with "Europe," his travels across America, his numerous friendships among writers and painters, is more a group portrait than a self-portrait. Brooks, the literary historian, triumphs over Brooks, the personal historian. Indeed he frequently interrupts ...