Maxwell Struthers Burt was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet. He also was an English instructor at Princeton University for two years and worked variously as a journalist and educator.
Background
Burt was born on October 18, 1882, in Baltimore, Maryland, to Horace Brooke and Hester Ann (Jones) Burt. Though he always described himself as a Philadelphian, since his family brought him to Pennsylvania as an infant.
Burt was raised and educated in Philadelphia, a part of the well-rooted, affluent society there. His ancestors, as he relished pointing out, were Irish rebels and American-Welsh Baptist ministers. He felt that this combination made him “both rebellious and tolerant.” But his immediate forbears were well-to-do, quiet people. His father, Horace Brooke Burt, was a lawyer.
Education
Burt attended private schools in Philadelphia, then went on to Princeton University. His high and low education was finished off with a year spent at the University of Munich and a year and a half at Merton College, Oxford.
After teaching at Princeton for two years, Burt set out in 1908, to homestead and desert-claim in Wyoming, finally starting the Bar BC Ranches, dude ranches he ran for much of his life. Burt wrote for the Princeton Tiger, he was its editor-in-chief, as well as other papers, and where he wrote scripts for the Triangle club. He was also engaged at Princeton for two years as an instructor in English, following some continental travels.
Between private school and Princeton, he spent two years as a reporter for the Philadelphia Times, working under Colonel Alexander McClure, the former private secretary to Abraham Lincoln and an old Civil War newsman. At the paper, Burt wrote variously of fires, suicides, murders and the like, cribbing from his editors a lean, racy style that mingled oddly with his refined, prep-school hand. At the Times he also met Philip Keats Speed, the great-grandnephew of John Keats. It was Speed who encouraged young Burt to pursue creative writing, particularly his beloved poetry.
Though Burt had been writing, by his own reckoning, since he was eight years old, he did not begin to publish his work until he had investigated many options. When he began to publish his work at age thirty, Burt’s writing glittered with facets from each of his early encounters. In 1918, Burt published his first collection of short stories, John O’May, and Other Stories, which included “The Water-Hole” and “A Cup of Tea,” which had been reprinted in The Best Short Stories of 1917. In 1920, Burt produced his second volume of poetry, Songs and Portraits. Burt next published another collection of stories, Chance Encounters in 1922.
The success of The Interpreter’s House not only moved Burt’s career toward novels but it enabled him to begin writing full-time in 1925. Following this triumph, Burt again attempted to bring out his poems in the 1925 collection, When I Grew Up to Middle Age. But again his poetry was pronounced middling.
In 1928, Burt again retraced his early scenes of success, producing a collection of short stories called They Could Not Sleep. Again, reviewers found the trip back to earlier successes a kind of regression.
Burt continued to publish short fiction in magazines, along with various novels and semi-fictional historical accounts, but his work remained rooted in the questions about American mores with which he began.
In 1954, Burt died in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he and his family lived. He is buried outside of Jackson, in a plot that looks upon the majesty of the Tetons from below.
Quotations:
“English education develops a man as an individual; German education develops him as a unit of a multitude.”
Membership
Burt was a member of the American Institute Arts and Letters.
Personality
Burt’s writing, which had focused so fixedly on the confrontation between old and new American values, between progressive pioneer spirit and the conservative Eastern traditions, had frozen itself in time. The author continued to be active in the literary world, however, writing reviews and sitting on award committees. His work was ahead of its time - then of its time, then behind the times - and remained itself somehow unchanged.
Quotes from others about the person
“The chief faults in Mr. Burt’s work are those of technique. Here and there a phrase shows an ear careless of rhythm.” - Helen Bullis
“Struthers Burt responds to the usual things in the usual way.”
Connections
Burt married Katharine Newlin, the author, on February 9, 1913. They had two children: Nathaniel, Julia Bleecker.