author
Vernon Louis Parrington
1871–1929
Best remembered for the Pulitzer Prize-winning Main Currents in American Thought, this influential critic helped shape how generations of readers understood American literature and ideas. He also led an unexpectedly varied life as a teacher, scholar, and early college football coach.
1 Audiobook
Main currents in American thought : An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
by Vernon Louis Parrington
About the author
Born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1871, Vernon Louis Parrington became an American literary historian and critic whose work left a lasting mark on the study of American culture. He studied at the College of Emporia and later at Harvard, then taught at the University of Oklahoma before joining the University of Washington.
Parrington is most closely associated with Main Currents in American Thought, his sweeping three-volume study of American intellectual and literary history. The first two volumes received the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928, and the work became widely influential for its broad, democratic reading of American writing and ideas.
He died in 1929 in England, before the final volume appeared. Even though scholarly fashions changed over time, his writing remains important for readers interested in the big relationship between literature, politics, and national life.