Carl Clinton Van Doren was an American critic and biographer.
Background
Van Doren was born in Hope, Illinois. He was the son of Charles Lucius Van Doren, a country doctor, and Dora Anne (Butz) Van Doren. He was the eldest of five sons; the second youngest son was the poet and scholar Mark Van Doren.
His paternal great-grandfather, Abraham Van Doren, had been the first of his Dutch line to leave New Jersey for the Middle West; his maternal ancestors were of Pennsylvania German and English stock. He was descended on both sides from sturdy country people who had been blacksmiths, farmers, and preachers.
In his determinedly cheerful autobiography, Three Worlds (1936), Van Doren described an idyllic nineteenth-century Midwestern boyhood. In 1900, the family moved to Urbana, Illinois, where the father retired from medical practice, farmed, and speculated in various business enterprises, often unsuccessfully.
Education
Carl attended Thorburn High School, where he played football and was president of his class. He was at the University of Illinois in Urbana from 1903 to 1907, when he received his B. A. He had been a great reader from earliest youth and expected to become a poet and novelist.
But Van Doren at college was already the accomplished scholar and tall, distinctive figure whose appearance was to be so important to him on the New York literary scene in the 1920's; he seemed a natural leader. He was to feel about his college days at Urbana what he had felt about his boyhood in a country village and was to feel about Columbia and New York: that he had a gift for being in the right place at the right time.
In September 1908, Van Doren left home at twenty-three to attend Columbia University on a graduate scholarship. Columbia and New York were to make Van Doren's professional career. He took his Ph. D. in 1911 with a dissertation on Thomas Love Peacock; his biography of Peacock was already in type when he submitted it to his committee at Columbia.
Career
Carl Clinton taught at Columbia, on a part- or full-time basis, from 1911 to 1930. He kept a graduate course in American literature at Columbia even when he was briefly (1916 - 1918) headmaster of the Brearley School. He liked to boast that at Columbia he had more graduate students in American literature than any other teacher had ever had. He was managing editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917 - 1920) and literary editor of the Century magazine (1922 - 1925).
In 1921, he published The American Novel, which he described as "the first history of that literary form, " and in 1922, Contemporary American Novelists, "the first systematic study of postwar American literature. " He collected his literary reviews in The Roving Critic (1923) and Many Minds (1924) and did early studies of Cabell (1925) and Lewis (1933). The most dramatic and successful narrative writing of his life was his biography of Benjamin Franklin (1938), which appeared at a time of urgent interest in the American past.
It was admired by most reviewers, sold 270, 000 copies in all editions, was generally considered the book of its year. The success of Benjamin Franklin led him to write other studies of the Revolutionary period: Secret History of The American Revolution (1941); Mutiny in January (1943), about an incident in the Continental Army in 1780-1781; The Great Rehearsal (1948), about the making and ratifying of the Constitution as a possible guide to the United Nations; and Jane Mecom (1950), a life of Franklin's sister. His last years were darkened by the strains in his second marriage.
Van Doren died in a hospital in Torrington, Connecticut, of a heart attack complicated by pneumonia. After cremation, his ashes were scattered over Wickwire, his home in Cornwall, Connecticut.
Quotations:
"The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity. "
"Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to. "
"Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained. "
"The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies. "
"IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction. "
"Guy Rivers, a conventional piece as regards the love affair which makes a part of the plot, is a tale of deadly strife between the laws of Georgia and a fiendish bandit. "
"It is obvious that no difficulty in the way of world government can match the danger of a world without it. "
"The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure. "
"Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel. "
"The most familiar quotations are the most likely to be misquoted. Some misquotations are still variable, some have settled down to false versions that have obscured the true ones. They have passed over from literature into speech. "
Personality
Van Doren was not a bold or venturesome critic, but he was indispensable to many writers struggling for recognition, and he knew and enjoyed the company of such writers as James Branch Cabell, Sinclair Lewis, and Elinor Wylie because he had been among the first to appreciate them.
A most elegant-looking man himself and an elegant, smooth, thoroughly acceptable writer, he bestowed his urbanity on every writer he discussed. Van Doren was all his life to think of himself as a novelist, and he did not take criticism seriously enough to take his own critical writing too seriously. But he lent his authority as a literary scholar and Columbia professor to his many genial, hospitable pieces about the new novelists and poets. Van Doren was a fluent, practiced, genial writer.
With his tall, rangy good looks, his dramatically close-clipped hair, his remarkably strong features, his memorably full, pleasant voice, he was a distinctive, and even "glamorous, " figure. Carl Van Doren was at heart a disappointed man. He had felt as a young man that "to write would be to tell stories. I had lived a good part of my days in a stream of narrative. " Criticism did not begin to satisfy this urge, nor did his novel The Ninth Wave (1926).
Connections
On August 23, 1912, Van Doren married Irita Bradford of Tallahassee, Florida, who bore him three daughters, Anne, Margaret, and Barbara.
Irita Van Doren was to become a prominent literary figure in her own right as editor of the New York Herald Tribune book section. The Van Dorens were divorced in 1935. Van Doren's second marriage, to Jean Wright Gorman on February 27, 1939, ended in divorce in 1945.