(Tracing North American Exploration from Balboa to Lewis a...)
Tracing North American Exploration from Balboa to Lewis and Clark, Devoto tells in a classic fashion how the drama of discovery defined the American nation. The Course of Empire is the third volume in historian Bernard Devoto’s monumental trilogy of the West. Entertaining and incisive, this is the dramatic story of three hundred years of exploration of North America leading up to 1805. Tracing North American Exploration from Balboa to Lewis and Clark, Devoto tells in a classic fashion how the drama of discovery defined the American nation.
(Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. Acro...)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize. Across the Wide Missouri tells the compelling story of the climax and decline of the Rocky Mountain fur trade during the 1830s. More than a history, it portrays the mountain fur trade as a way of business and a way of life, vividly illustrating how it shaped the expansion of the American West.
Bernard Augustine De Voto is an American historian, critic, essayist, biographer, novelist, and short story writer. He is chiefly remembered for three volumes of American history, The Year of Decision: 1846, Across the Wide Missouri, and The Course of Empire. These works comprise a detailed, complex, and vividly presented overview of the importance of the frontier experience in shaping American culture, politics, and national character.
Background
Bernard De Voto was born on January 11, 1897 in Ogden, Utah, United States to a Roman Catholic father and a Mormon mother. Neither parent was actively religious, and De Voto grew up acutely aware of his family’s differences from their predominantly Mormon neighbors.
Education
Bernard De Voto received his elementary education at Sacred Heart Academy in Ogden, Utah, United States.
After excelling in Ogden High School, from which he graduated in 1914, Bernard attended the University of Utah in Salt Lake City for a year and then enrolled at Harvard in the fall of 1915.
After graduating from Harvard in 1920 with a major in philosophy as part of the class of 1918 whose studies had been interrupted by armed service during World War 1, he returned to Utah.
From 1920-1921, Bernard Augustine De Voto taught history at Ogden Junior High School. Then, he obtained a teaching position at Northwestern University in Chicago. There, in 1924, he published his first novel, The Crooked Mile.
Over the next several years, De Voto wrote magazine articles, short stories, and in 1927 moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he devoted his full time to writing. He joined the faculty the faculty of the English Department at Harvard in 1929, first as an instructor and then as a lecturer, and edited the Harvard Graduate's Magazine from 1930 through 1932. In 1932, he published a well-received work of history and criticism, Mark Twain’s America. From 1932 to 1938, and from time to time thereafter, DeVoto was a regular staff member of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for two weeks every summer at Middlebury College in Vermont. In 1935, Bernard became an editor of Harper’s “Easy Chair” column, and his often controversial pronouncements on politics, education, literature, automobile travel, and the perfect martini, among other topics, appeared monthly until 1955. For two years, from 1936, De Voto added to his other duties the editorship of the Saturday Review of Literature in New York City. In January 1938, he resigned as editor but continued to write occasionally for the magazine.
In 1938, De Voto was made curator of the Mark Twain papers held by Harvard’s Widener Library. Over the next eight years he edited and arranged for the publication of two important new Twain collections: Mark Twain in Eruption (1940) and Letters from the Earth (1962). In 1946 De Voto resigned as curator, partly out of annoyance at the restrictions placed on his use of the papers, and partly because he felt he had learned all he could from them and had written all he wanted about Mark Twain. His second major study, Mark Twain at Work, had been published to enthusiastic reviews in 1942.
In 1943, was published The Year of Decision: 1846 which became a best seller. The same year, De Voto made a series of lectures on twentieth-century American literature at Indiana University; these were published in 1944, to considerable controversy, as The Literary Fallacy.
From 1946 to 1954, Bernard published some twenty articles about a planned political assault on America’s public lands and had been promoting the conservation of natural resources. In 1947, appeared Across the Wide Missouri, the second volume of DeVoto’s historical trilogy. In 1950, he composed The World of Fiction consisting of several essays on the technique of fiction writing.
In 1952, was published the final volume of the historical trilogy, The Course of Empire. During that year he participated in the national presidential campaign as a speechwriter and advisor to Governor Adlai Stevenson on public lands policy.
DeVoto’s third collection of Harper’s essays, The Easy Chair, was published in 1955. His twentieth-anniversary Easy Chair, “Number 241,” appeared in Harper’s in November.
At the time of his premature death in 1955, DeVoto had completed about two-thirds of a book about the complex relationships of history, geography, and ecology of the American West, to be called Western Paradox. The partial typescript was examined and edited beginning in 1997, following a centennial conference in New Orleans about DeVoto’s life and work, by the historians Patricia Nelson Limerick and Douglas Brinkley.
Bernard Augustine De Voto was a member of advisory board for National Parks, a member of the National Institute Arts and Letters, and a member of the Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest academic honor society in the United States (from 1920)
Personality
Bernard Augustine De Voto remains a controversial figure in twentieth-century American letters for the belligerence with which he set forth his critical opinions, asserting his infallibility, especially in historical matters, while assuming that no one else possessed his comprehensive knowledge of literature and history.
Quotes from others about the person
"In The Course of Empire, bound by the enormity of his task and by an unwillingness to ignore the facts.De Voto nevertheless filled his account with minor mysteries and marvels" Orlan Sawey, a biographer.
"He emphasized the great curiosity of the mountain men, the trappers, and the westering pioneers as to what lay beyond the mountains. He also dramatized the Indian Wars and wondered that ‘The Indians resisted decadence as well as they did, preserved as much as they did and fought the whites off so obstinately and so long. For from 1500 on they were cultural prisoners." Orlan Sawey, a biographer.
"A historian constantly influenced hy the literary way of thinking. While he was careful to make his history factual, he was always affected by an irrepressible imagination." Orlan Sawey, a biographer.
Connections
On June 30, 1923, Bernard married Avis MacVicar, a student in his freshman English class in the Northwestern University. They had two boys. Their names are Gordon King, born in 1930 and Mark Bernard, born in 1940.