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Stuart Pratt Sherman was an American literary critic and educator.
Background
He was born on October 1, 1881, in Anita, Iowa, United States. He was the son of John and Ada Martha (Pratt) Sherman, belonged to an old New England family tracing its descent from Edmund Sherman who came to Massachusetts about 1634. His father, a lover of music and poetry, was, ironically, a druggist who had wandered out to Anita, Iowa.
In 1882 the family moved to Rolfe, Iowa, and in 1887 to Los Angeles, seeking a more healthful climate for the father, who died in 1892. The family later returned to New England.
Education
Stuart moved to New England, where attended Troy Conference Academy at Poultney, Vermont, and subsequently the high school in Williamstown, Massachussets. He entered the sophomore class of Williams College in 1900, won prizes in Latin, French, and German.
Graduating in 1903, he did graduate work in English at Harvard, where he was profoundly influenced by Irving Babbitt. He received the degree of Ph. D. in 1906, with a brilliant thesis on John Ford, expanded and published in 1915 as an introduction to his edition of Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, and The Broken Heart.
Career
In September 1906 Sherman became an instructor at Northwestern University. In 1907 he accepted a call to the University of Illinois.
A letter which he published in the Nation, May 14, 1908, attacking the formalism of graduate instruction in English, attracted wide attention. During the summer of 1908 he served as an editorial writer for the Nation and was offered a position on its staff, but the University of Illinois countered by raising him to the rank of associate professor. For the next ten years, however, he was a frequent contributor to the Nation, with whose policy, under the editorship of Paul Elmer More, he was for a time in almost complete sympathy.
He was made a full professor in 1911 and permanent chairman of the English department in 1914. With a group of devoted colleagues, he made it one of the strongest in the Middle West. His best course, on Matthew Arnold, resulted in the publication of Matthew Arnold: How to Know Him (1917), acclaimed by the caustic Irving Babbitt as "the first good book" on the subject. In 1917 he published On Contemporary Literature, an application of Arnold's principles to the chief contemporary writers with devastating results.
The entrance of the United States into the World War fired his patriotism, and in an address on "American and Allied Ideals, " delivered on December 1, 1917, before the National Council of Teachers of English, he attacked the philosophy of Nietzsche, particularly as expressed by H. L. Mencken. This assault began an exhilarating literary quarrel with Mencken, which continued intermittently for nearly a decade, with much expenditure of wit by both combatants.
In "Is There Anything to be Said for Literary Traditions?" (October 1920) he attacked the whole group of modernist critics. The controversy thus begun raged for several years. His gradual turning to the left may be followed in Americans (1922), The Genius of America (1923), and Points of View (1924).
In 1924 he contributed a series of critical essays to an edition de luxe of Men of Letters of the British Isles: Portrait Medallions from the Life and published My Dear Cornelia, in defense of modernism. In April 1924 he became editor of Books, the literary supplement of the New York Herald Tribune.
His death came as the result of a heart attack while swimming ashore from an overturned canoe near his summer cottage at Dunewood on Lake Michigan.
Achievements
Stuart Pratt Sherman was known for his philosophical "feud" with H. L. Mencken. He was a natural teacher, noted for his sound scholarship, mainly on the works of Matthew Arnold, and for his passion for the living values of literature. He built the UIUC English Department into one of the strongest in the Midwest. Besides, Sherman became editor of “Books, ” the literary supplement to the New York Herald Tribune, which became under his editorship the leading American critical journal of the day.
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Views
Believing intensely in democracy, he thought that contemporary American literature had gone astray through lack of loyalty to the national ideal and that the spiritually alien strain in our recent literature was due to the later importations of European blood and culture.
Sherman confused his defense of the ethical content of literature with a defense of traditional emotion, nationalism, and Puritanism. He ended by being largely converted to the position of his opponents, confessing that he had erred in trying to make men good instead of happy.
Personality
Under the influence of the emotions bred by the war, Sherman for a time became almost chauvinistic in his nationalism.
Connections
On December 25 he was married to Ruth Bartlett Mears, daughter of Leverett Mears, a chemistry professor at Williams. The couple had a son.
