As professor of English at Columbia University and literary editor and reviewer for the Nation, poet, critic, teacher, and anthologist Mark Van Doren resided through most of his career at the very center of the established literary scene in New York. His older brother Carl Van Doren had been literary editor for the Nation before him, and his sister-in-law Irita Van Doren became editor of New York Herald Tribune Books. With the publication of major works on Thoreau (1916)--his master's thesis, Dryden (1920)--his Ph.D. thesis, and Robinson (1927), he quickly established his reputation as a scholar. At the Nation and Columbia he formed important friendships with such notable figures of his time as Mortimer Adler, John Berryman, Robert Caldwell, Whitaker Chambers, John Erskine, Robert Frost, Joseph Wood Krutch, Thomas Merton, Allen Tate, James Thurber, Lionel Trilling, and Louis Zukofsky.

Mark Van Doren was a prolific writer in almost...