Van Wyck Brooks

Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1886, Van Wyck Brooks became one of the most prominent American literary critics of the 20th century. He studied at Harvard and built his reputation by writing about the relationship between literature and national life, asking how American writers could create a culture that felt both serious and distinctly their own.

Brooks is especially remembered for his wide-ranging studies of American literary history, including the multi-volume Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800–1915. In 1940 he received the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865, a book that explored the thinkers and writers who shaped 19th-century New England.

Across his long career, he wrote with the conviction that books matter not just as art, but as part of a nation's character. He died in 1963, leaving behind a body of work that helped define how many readers and scholars understand American literature.