Background
Brooks, Van Wyck was born on February 16, 1886 in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States. Son of Charles Edward and Sarah B. (Ames) Brooks.
biographer historian literary critic
Brooks, Van Wyck was born on February 16, 1886 in Plainfield, New Jersey, United States. Son of Charles Edward and Sarah B. (Ames) Brooks.
Bachelor of Arts, Harvard, 1908, Doctor of Letters. Doctor of Letters, Columbia, Tufts, Bowdoin, Boston University, Dartmouth College, Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, Union College, Fairleigh Dickinson University. Doctor of Humane Letters, Northwestern University.
Instructor English, Stanford, 1911-1913. With Century Company, publications, New York, 1915-1918. Associate editor The Freeman, 1920-1924.
Bibliography:
1905: Verses by Two Undergraduates (with John Hall Wheelock)
1908: The Wine of the Puritans: A Study of Present-Day America
1913: The Malady of the Ideal: Senancour, Maurice de Guérin, and Amiel
1914: John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study
1915: The World of H.G. Wells
1915: America's Coming of Age
1920: The Ordeal of Mark Twain
1925: The Pilgrimage of Henry James
1925: Henry Thoreau, Bachelor of Nature (by Leon Bazalgette, translated by Van Wyck Brooks)
1932: The Life of Emerson
1934: Three Essays on America
1936: The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (Makers and Finders)
1940: New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1914 (Makers and Finders)
1941: Opinions of Oliver Allston
1941: On Literature Today
1944: The World of Washington Irving (Makers and Finders)
1947: The Times of Melville and Whitman (Makers and Finders)
1948: A Chilmark Miscellany
1952: The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (Makers and Finders)
1952: Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915
1953: The Writer in America
1954: Scenes and Portraits: Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (An Autobiography)
1955: John Sloan: A Painter's Life
1956: Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait
1957: Days of the Phoenix: The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember (An Autobiography)
1958: The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915
1958: From a Writer's Notebook
1959: Howells: His Life and World
1961: From the Shadow of the Mountain: My Post-Meridian Years (An Autobiography)
1962: Fenollosa and His Circle: With Other Essays in Biography
1965: An Autobiography
Fellow American Academy Arts and Sciences, Royal Society of Literature (London). Member American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Philosophical Society, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married to Eleanor Kenyon Stimson, 1911 (died 1946).; married second, Gladys Rice. Children: Charles Van Wyck, Oliver Kenyon.