"Yes, it's hard to write, but it's harder not to." - Carl Van Doren

Pulitzer Prize winner. Columbia University associate professor of English & English Literature. The very definition of a scholar, Carl Van Doren (1885-1950) became one of the preeminent historians on another great American, Benjamin Franklin, impressing the world with his 1938 biography, Benjamin Franklin, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for American Biography, awarded in 1939.

Van Doren was born in the hamlet of Hope, Illinois on 10 September, 1885. He was educated at Columbia University, where he eventually received his Ph.D. in 1911, and continued on there to teach until 1930. While there, he was loud among the voices who brought studies of American literature and history to standards in university study. While at Columbia, he served as managing editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-1921), and literary editor of The Nation (1919-1922) and Century Magazine (1922-1925). Before leaving Columbia 1930, he began editing The Literary Guild (1926-1934).

He died 18 July 1950, in Torrington, Connecticut at the age of 65 after publishing countless articles in magazines and books, notably his Pulitzer-winning Benjamin Franklin, and The American Novel, a historical look at the development of "The Great American Novel" in 1921, which, according to the preface, hopes to "serve as a chapter in the history of the American imagination." He was survived by his daughters Ann, Barbara and Margaret, and his brothers Frank, Guy, Mark, and Paul.


"A classic is a book that doesn't have to be written again." - Carl Van Doren

P U B L I C A T I O N S

1921 - The American Novel (revised in 1940 with Mark Van Doren)
1922 - Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920
1923 - The Roving Critic
1924 - Many Minds
1925 - Other Provinces
1925 - American and British Literature Since 1890 (with Mark Van Doren, revised in 1939)
1926 - The Ninth Wave
1930 - Swift
1933 - Sinclair Lewis
1933 - American Literature: An Introduction
1935 - An Anthology of World Prose (editor)
1936 - Three Worlds (autobiography)
1938 - Benjamin Franklin (Pulitzer Prize for American biography, 1939)
1939 - An Illinois Boyhood
1941 - Secret History of the American Revolution
1943 - Mutiny in January
1946 - American Scriptures (with Carl Carmer)
1948 - The Great Rehearsal
1950 - Jane Mecom, the Favorite Sister of Benjamin Franklin


S O U R C E S

http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/carl_van_doren/
http://libweb.princeton.edu/libraries/firestone/rbsc/aids/vandoren.html
Encyclopædia Britannica
http://www.bartleby.com/187/p1.html

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