Maxwell David Geismar

Background

Geismar was born on August 1, 1909 in New York City, the son of Leon Geismar and Mary Feinberg. He was to spend most of his life in and around New York.

Education

In 1927 Geismar graduated from Scarsdale High School in suburban Westchester County, where he was editor of the school magazine and was elected one of two captains of the baseball team, for which he played left field. He later enrolled in Columbia University, where he took literature courses from Henry Ladd and Mark Van Doren and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1931, Geismar was awarded a B. A. degree; he was class valedictorian and received the Moncrief Proudfitt Fellowship in Letters. He received his M. A. at Columbia in 1932.

Career

The summer after high school graduation Geismar went to work for the Brooklyn Eagle, where he reported on tennis for about three weeks, after which he was relieved of his duties for playing the sport better than he wrote about it. Sorry to leave the paper for which Walt Whitman had once served as editor, he moved on to the Glen Cove Echo, where he wrote assigned articles. In the fall of that year he took a job in an advertising agency. He soon left the advertising agency in favor of a more "manly" job - driving a furniture truck. He also worked in a garage and as a tutor. The next summer he was an assistant director of The Floating Hospital, a charitable organization for underprivileged children. The year after that he became its director. In 1933, Geismar received a teaching fellowship at Harvard, where he studied nineteenth-century literature. After he left Harvard, Geismar's twelve-year academic career was centered exclusively at Sarah Lawrence College for Women (now called Sarah Lawrence College) in Bronxville, New York. At Sarah Lawrence, Geismar became a well-known figure, always wearing the same old brown hat pulled down over his eyes. He taught from 1933 until 1945 and spent summers on a farm in the Adirondack Mountains, where he played tennis and darts and built furniture. He left teaching in 1945 to become a full-time free-lance writer, historian, and critic. He maintained an office in his home on Winfield Avenue in Harrison, New York, from which he issued some twenty books and editions. His literary friends included Maxwell Perkins and Edmund Wilson. He first established his reputation in 1942, with Writers in Crisis: The American Novel 1925-1940, a study of Lardner, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Wolfe, and Steinbeck. In it he showed that the Great Depression of the 1930's, considered by many to be destructive and the source of despair, was actually "a time of regeneration for the writer. " Writers in Crisis was the first of a projected five-volume series of literary studies, with the overall title of The Novel in America, intended to cover a century of native prose. However, only three volumes in the series were published. Geismar's literary panorama continued with The Last of the Provincials: The American Novel 1915-1925 (1947), and Rebels and Ancestors: The American Novel 1890-1915 (1953). While he did not complete the former series, he did produce several arresting and controversial volumes during the last two decades of his life. One of his most widely reviewed books was Henry James and the Jacobites (1963), which attempted to overturn the prevailing opinion that James was a great writer. Geismar saw James instead as a great entertainer. Even more upsetting to some was Geismar's Mark Twain: An American Prophet (1970), in which he contended that Twain's best work was to be found in his later books, not in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Geismar berated others for missing the significance of Twain's late social criticism. Geismar's most accessible book is American Moderns: From Rebellion to Conformity (1958). Unlike those in The Novel in America series, it began as a collection of his articles and book reviews written for a broader audience. When Geismar wasn't writing his own works of criticism and literary history, he was editing the works of others. He produced a Whitman Reader (1955), a Ring Lardner Reader (1963), a Mark Twain bestiary titled The Higher Animals (1976), and editions of works by Dreiser, Melville, London, and Anderson. Perhaps his most curious effort was a Portable Thomas Wolfe (1946). That volume with its oxymoronic title reduced all of Wolfe's sprawling, garrulous, and undisciplined output to 250, 000 words. In 1966, Geismar became a senior editor at Ramparts magazine, and in 1970 he became a founding editor of Scanlan's Monthly. He died of a heart attack in his hometown of Harrison.

Achievements

• Geismar was a literary critic, notable for his works.

Works

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• book

  • Rockwell Kent's Greenland Journal

    (Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), an energetic and multitalented...)

  • The Ring Lardner Reader (Hudson River Editions)

    (A collection of plays, essays, and songs which adequately...)

  • The Whitman Reader

    (Here, in one volume, is Walt Whitman's most glorious work...)

  • The Higher Animals: A Mark Twain Bestiary

    (Drama, Plays, Theatre, Literature, Reading, Learning)

  • The Last Of The Provincials: Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson And F Scott Fitzgerald.

Connections

On September 11, 1932 Geismar married Anne Rosenberg; the couple had three children.

Father:

Leon Geismar

Mother:

Mary Feinberg

Spouse:

Anne Rosenberg