Background
Brownell was born on August 30, 1851, in New York City. His parents, Isaac Wilbour and Lucia Brown Brownell, were well-to-do, moderately progressive New Englanders.
(Based on Emerson’s English Traits (1856), Brownell’s book...)
Based on Emerson’s English Traits (1856), Brownell’s book attempts to show how social norms and literary forms shape each other. He praises French poise and confidence, remarking that these “sociological” traits are mirrored by the bold intellectual- ism of French letters. In writing this book, Brownell was making a bid for the well-traveled, well-read, broad-minded perspective he imagined to be indispensable for the man-of-letters. He would follow in the traditions of Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson, constituting himself as a Victorian critic.
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editor journalist literary critic
Brownell was born on August 30, 1851, in New York City. His parents, Isaac Wilbour and Lucia Brown Brownell, were well-to-do, moderately progressive New Englanders.
Brownell's parents were able to provide Brownell a solid education. The precocious Brownell received an A.A. from Amherst at nineteen years of age and entered immediately into journalism.
Brownell first reported for Pulitzer’s paper, The New York World, and quickly advanced to city editor there. In 1879, his career progressed once more when he landed a position at the Nation. Two years after achieving this respectable level of literary success, Brownell pushed for greater visibility by training himself to occupy the old-fashioned position of “man of letters.”
After leaving the Nation, Brownell and his wife spent three years in Paris, compiling materials for Brownell’s first book, French Traits: An Essay in Comparative Criticism (1889).
While writing this book, Brownell continued his journalism career, acting as editor for the Philadelphia Press and then for Charles Scribner’s Sons, a publishing house where he worked until his death. He also developed literary connections, joining New York’s Century Association. But after his first book’s publication, Brownell became more and more involved in achieving the role of arbiter of taste. He wrote a companion text for his first book in 1892, French Art: Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, securing his reputation as a broadly educated man of judgment.
In 1901, he turned his attention to the issue that would form the core of his interests: nineteenth-century writing. Brownell lived his life in the manner he wished. He was a Victorian man of letters, even if he wasn’t a Victorian.
He died on July 22, 1928, to the end a gentleman and a scholar.
(In it, Brownell deduces from the study of prose masters a...)
(Based on Emerson’s English Traits (1856), Brownell’s book...)
(In 1924, Brownell published this tract outlining the soci...)
Brownell had always maintained a rather antique notion of literary criticism; it was this archaic ideal that both created his career and stymied it.
Brownell felt that the best writers were able to focus their thoughts, feelings, and modes of expressions on a pure ideal; in all cases, intellect must guide feeling. This abstract conception is given evidence through the close study of individual authors. He was to argue for the same standards in this text’s follow-up, American Prose Masters: Cooper, Hawthorne, Emerson, Poe, Lowell, Henry James (1909). This study, like its predecessor, was well received. But in searching out the eternal and brushing aside fashions, Brownell managed only to remain rooted in the ideals of the nineteenth century.
As the years went by, his assessments of the eternal worth became period pieces themselves. He refused fashion, and in time fashion began to refuse him.
Brownell’s lengthy, many-legged sentences began to get out-of-touch with the sharp, lean style of the Teens and Twenties. Importantly, too, the role of the “man-of- letters” had changed after the Great War: the moderate, conservative mode of carefully adjudicating the worth of new forms by comparing them to the “standards” of a bygone era was less useful for the tradition-breaking moderns. The modern period was bold, and in its aesthetics, Brownell became a throwback to an age he had barely experienced.
Brownell did not attempt to join new movements; he insisted that literary convention be maintained in the manner of his nineteenth-century heroes.
In his final text, Brownell attempted to answer those who would relegate him to the past by writing about America’s future. Democratic Distinction in America (1927) attempts to show, through a historical consideration of American culture, what traits define American character. From this study, Brownell moves to a discussion of what American culture must strive to be. But in this last effort, too, Brownell’s writing is too florid, according to critics, too much in the olden style he had affected, though it was not without merit.
The field of nineteenth-century writing was well-suited to Brownell since he imagined himself in the role of the Victorian man of the world, the Victorian man of letters. Moreover, Brownell tended to be a better reader of texts than a prognosticator of literary fame. That is, while he was always insightful in his treatments of the individual figure, he often predicted “eternal fame” for writers who would fall by the wayside. Brownell’s first book on Victorian fiction, Victorian Prose Masters: Thackeray, Carlyle, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Ruskin and George Meredith (1901) proved him, however, an ideal scholar of individual Victorian writers.
Quotes from others about the person
"Brownell has rendered real and novel service to American letters, to letters in America, to the vital function of the intellect in the national life.”
“Brownell had apparent indifference to the literature of the post-World War I era. It seems remiss in him that he did not while reviewing his cherished proprieties of literary practice, address his seasoned critical talent to current writers who could have served as case studies no less and for his readers perhaps far more instructively than the Victorians. His epigrammatic and anecdotal frames are almost entirely occupied by nineteenth-century faces. It is possible that he simply could not find contemporary masters of prose. But his growing hostility to the age, already apparent in Standards, better explains the neglect.” - Thomas R. Nevin
“Mr. Brownell’s criticism pursues truth with fine concentration upon its object - and with very notable technique. One wishes for this discourse a wider influence than it is likely, one apprehends, to exert; for it is full of valuable distinctions, wise counsel, and technical hints of which American criticism generally stands in crying need.”
“Mr. Brownell moves through at least half of his book with a pace no less admirable than sure, and makes point after point which it would be folly to controvert. Unfortunately, Mr. Brownell reads only the older authors. Members of his generation will perhaps share with him his desire to see prose today grow into a richer, more beautiful instrument. As sensor and counselor, however, they will feel that he has laid a hand upon them quite as dead as it is shapely.” - Mark Van Doren
“One hopes there is enough discipline left in the anarchic contemporary world of art and criticism which Mr. Brownell deprecates to cope with the pregnancy of his own subtle, but perhaps a little too sophisticated style.” - H. S. Canby
In 1878, Brownell married another member of the New England elite, Virginia Shields Swinburne. She died in 1911 and Brownell married Gertrude Hall, a poet and novelist.