Van Wyck Brooks -The Saviour of American Literature
Origins
Today we read writers like Fennimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, Louisa May Alcott and Theodore Dreiser as if they have always been there. And if we haven’t read them we have at least heard of them. The point is they would not have been available to read without the work of one man, one American, Van Wyck Brooks.
Brooks was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on February 16th 1886, which, in that year, was no longer the small backwater it had been, but a thriving, bustling New York commuter dormitory, which didn’t suit people like Van Wyck’s mother, Sallie Brooks, who thought it unnecessary and rather common.
As James Hoopes reminds us in his 1977 biography:
“ Sallie Brooks never questioned her own qualifications as an arbiter of American taste and culture, and it would have been surprising if she had done so, with her secure upper-class childhood and ancestry that was, as she understood the word, impeccably American. Consciously proud of her Dutch and English forebears, she was quick to join the ‘Daughters of the American Revolution’ when the organization was founded in the 1890s.”
The first of Sallie Brooks’ ancestors to settle in America, some seven generations before the birth…
