Van Wyck Brooks

With the publication of The Flowering of New England, VAN WYCK BROOKS,critic and biographer, embarked upon his magnum opus, a study of American authors from 1815 to 1915. The big trilogy was completed in 1951, and Mr. Brooks then turned his thoughts to contemporary writers and to the New Criticism, which sometimes illuminates and sometimes obscures our understanding. The essay which follows is drawn from his non book. The Writer in America, to be published by Dutton this month.

FOREWORD. — Against the background of an eager, adolescent nation, Van Wyek Brooks shows us the American authors of the early 1800’s, the statesmen they admired, the artists who painted them, the scientists, native or immigrant, who brought wonder to a society that was already outgrowing its provincialism. The world of Washington Irving was far wider than the thirteen colonies, and those who peopled it were, many of them, citizens of the world.

FOREWORD. — Against the background of an eager, adolescent nation, Van Wyck Brooks shows us the American authors of the early 1800’s, the statesmen they admired, the artists who painted them, the scientists, native or immigrant, who brought wonder to a society that was already outgrowing its provincialism. The world of Washington Irving was far wider than the thirteen colonies, and those who peopled it were, many of them, citizens of the world.

FOREWORD. In The Flowering of New England, Van Wyck Brooks conceived and animated a new form of literary history. Perceptive and illuminating, his studies of American writers are a skillful blending of the individual essence with the temper of the times. In his new book, of which we shall publish more than a third, Mr. Brooks turns to New York and Philadelphia to appraise those authors and artists who were at their zenith in the early nineteenth century.