Background

Howard Mumford Jones was born on April 16, 1892 in Saginaw, Michigan, the only child of Frank Alexander Jones, a salesman and small businessman, and Josephine Whitman Miles, a hairdresser; both parents were descended from New England emigrants to the W. The family moved to Milwaukee, and, a few years before his father's death in 1906, to La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Education

In his autobiography Jones recalled his schooling and his newspaper route, his German and Norwegian neighbors, and his mother's working days. He finished high school in 1910.

He then entered the University of Wisconsin, where he studied with O. J. Campbell and William Ellery Leonard. After the graduation in 1914 he was awarded the B. A. He then went to the University of Chicago, where he found broader intellectual horizons. He received the M. A. in 1915 and the following year published his thesis, a translation of Heine's North Sea cycle, with commentary on Heine's and Swinburne's North Sea poetry.

Career

After finishing high school in 1910, Jones then took a two-year normal-school pre teaching course, held summer jobs as a typist for the novelist Hamlin Garland and on the railroad, and wrote regional prose and poetry. His first publication was A Little Book of Local Verse in 1915.

In 1916 he became adjunct professor of English and general literature at the University of Texas. Thus began his connection with the South. His first stay at the University of Texas ended in the wake of conflict between the university and Governor Jim Ferguson; discontented with the precarious financial situation at Texas, he accepted an offer from State University of Montana at Missoula. There he continued writing poetry, saw something of labor struggles in Butte.

He was called back to the University of Texas in 1919 as associate professor of comparative literature and remained there until 1925. This period was one of scholarly achievement, much activity in university dramatic productions, frequent public speaking, and varied writings. It ended with a leave of absence in 1924 and 1925, spent in Chicago on research in Franco-American cultural relations. There he received a letter from the new University of Texas administration dismissing him without cause, but soon thereafter he accepted an offer from the up-and-coming University of North Carolina.

Jones described his five years at the University of North Carolina as some of "the more blessed" years of his life, characterized by congenial colleagues, rewarding activities (founding a college bookstore and continuing to produce dramas and to write for magazines) and the publication in 1927 of his first major academic study, America and French Culture (1750 - 1848), for which he later received the American Historical Association's Jusserand Medal.

His extraordinary poetic talent came into full bloom in a volume of translations of Romanesque lyric that was published, with P. S. Allen, in 1928. From that time on he moved rapidly forward in the academic world.

He became professor of English at the University of Michigan in 1930, published a biography of the early Americanist Moses C. Tyler (1933), and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the period 1932-1933, which he devoted to research for his biography of poet Thomas Moore, The Harp That Once (1937).

In 1936 he received an honorary doctorate at the Harvard Tercentenary and was almost simultaneously offered a professorship, at a time when the Harvard Department of English was losing some of its most significant faculty. Jones was different from the traditional Harvard English professors, and graduate students were amused to hear how he sat on his desk singing cowboy songs to his class.

He remained productive even after retirement, writing his "magisterial trilogy" on American civilization, O Strange New World (1964), which was awarded a Pulitzer prize for general nonfiction, The Age of Energy (1971), and Revolution and Romanticism (1974) - massive studies of the intricate evolution of culture in the Americas. These studies were successful even though they were sometimes overloaded with material and not always clear in definition. He also wrote innumerable reviews and articles in learned journals and "quality" magazines - Atlantic, Scribner's, the Saturday Review of Literature - and some of the finest reviews ever printed in a newspaper, during his tenure as literary editor of the Boston Transcript (1938 - 1940).

His array of honorary degrees is stupendous. Jones's career at Harvard was happy, with one exception: his term as dean of the Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences (1943 - 1944), during which his plans for reform were not adopted. He resigned suddenly from that position, the "gaudy title" of which, he noted, concealed the fact that "I had responsibilities but no authority. " Jones later served with the Provost Marshal General's Office in reeducation of German prisoners at Fort Kearny, writing texts for them on American history and conditions.

In 1950 the Joneses went to Munich to work in the newly founded Amerika-Institut. They made two journeys to Israel, where in 1964 Jones lectured on America at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He held several visiting lectureships at American universities, both before and after his retirement from Harvard as Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of Humanities in 1962. Jones remained productive as ever - eleven of his books were published after 1962.

His phenomenal capacity for reading and writing was undiminished nearly to the end, as were his firm public views - he refused to accept posts at institutions that insisted on special oaths for teachers, and he presented forcefully his stands on academic freedom, civic concerns, the role of the humanities, the traditional principles of the Enlightenment, and the significance of American contributions to world civilization, especially in literature and philosophy.

He died in Cambridge, Massachussets, still at work at age eighty-eight, urging deeper American explorations of distant world civilizations and preparing a study of the American West.

Achievements

• Howard Mumford Jones's main achievement was winning the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years. He also authored Belief and Disbelief in American Literature (1967), The Age of Energy (1971), and many scholarly journal articles. Prior to that he was honored with the American Historical Association's Jusserand Medal for his first major academic study, America and French Culture (1750 - 1848). Also, Howard Jones was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the period 1932-1933, which he devoted to research for his biography of poet Thomas Moore, The Harp That Once (1937). He was a popular lecturer, offering large courses in English and American literature and successful seminars on American writers. It would be difficult to list more than a small sampling of his scholarly production, which included numerous monographs and collections of essays and addresses; anthologies; editions; commentaries; and many articles on literature, education, and American traditions. Jones was president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1944 - 1951); chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies (1955 - 1959), chairman of the Weil Institute (1959 - 1960), a recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa medal (1973), and president of the Modern Language Association (1965). The Howard Mumford Jones Professorship of American Studies at Harvard University is named in his honor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • History and Relevance: (Wimmer Memorial Lectures)

    (The 1980s were certainly years of turmoil and upheaval fu...)

  • O Strange New World

    (O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years...)

  • Wisconsin plays : second series; original one-act plays from the repertory of the Wisconsin dramatic society

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Howard Mumford Jones: An Autobiography.

    (The biography of a man of letters expressing the insights...)

  • Belief and Disbelief in American Literature

    (This suave and cultivated book examines the beliefs of Am...)

  • A Little Book of Local Verse

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Emerson on education;: Selections (Classics in education)

    (Softcover Published by Teachers College Press Classics i...)

  • The Pursuit of Happiness

    (Hardcover with dust jacket. VG/VG. Corner-clipped dust ja...)

  • The Pursuit of Happiness: Why are we driving ourselves crazy and how can we stop?

    (Pursuit of Happiness)

  • The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865-1915

    (History. Mr. Jones deals with the dynamic years between t...)

  • Humane Traditions in America: A List of Suggested Readings
  • JEFFERSONIANISM AND THE A MERICAN NOVEL
  • O Strange New World: American Culture, The Formative Years (A Viking Compass book)
  • Science before Darwin: A Nineteenth-Century Anthology
  • Gargoyles and Other Poems

Views

During the years of working at the State University of Montana, Jones began to develop his new concept of the relation of American culture to Europe, emphasizing the manifold influence, especially of Latin cultures, on the Americans. His faith, he had written, was that of a Stoic. His great guides were Goethe and Jefferson. As he was recalled by the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences, Jones was indeed "the least parochial of American scholars. "

Quotations: "While it is true that we in this nation remain free to be idiotic, it does not necessarily follow that we must be idiotic in order to be free!"

Membership

Howard Jones was a member of the Learned Societies and a member of the Modern Language Association.

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Jones enjoyed works of Goethe whom he called his great guide.

Connections

On July 18, 1918 Howard Mumford Jones was married to Clara McLure. They had one child and were divorced in 1925. After moving to Chicago, there he met Bessie Judith Zaban, a brilliant student, whom he married in 1927. She would later be his coeditor on The Many Voices of Boston (1976).

Father:

Frank Alexander Jones

salesman, small businessman

Mother:

Josephine Whitman Miles

hairdresser

1st wife:

Clara McLure

2nd wife:

Bessie Judith Zaban

associate:

David Brion Davis

cultural historian

associate:

Betty Miller Unterberger

She was the first woman professor at Texas A&M University and also the first woman president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

References

• Dark laughter. With an introd. by Howard Mumford Jones.
• Moby-Dick Or, the Whale with Commentary by Howard Mumford Jones
• Howard Mumford Jones and the Dynamics of Liberal Humanism