A short life of the author
Carl Clinton Van Doren (10 September 1885 – 18 July 1950) was an American biographer, critic, editor, and literary historian who played a significant role in shaping how Americans understood their own literary tradition in the early twentieth century, and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Benjamin Franklin (1938) is one of the finest works of American biographical writing.
Early Life and Academic Career
Van Doren was born in Hope, Illinois, the elder brother of Mark Van Doren (who would also become a prominent literary figure and Pulitzer Prize winner). He studied at the University of Illinois and received his PhD from Columbia University in 1911. He joined the Columbia faculty and became one of the university’s most influential teachers of American literature at a time when American literature was not yet fully established as a subject of serious academic study.
Literary Criticism
Van Doren’s critical works were instrumental in defining the American literary canon. The American Novel, 1789–1939 (first published in 1921 as The American Novel and revised in 1940) was one of the first comprehensive surveys of American fiction and helped establish the reputations of writers like Herman Melville, whom Van Doren championed at a time when Melville was largely forgotten.
Contemporary American Novelists, 1900–1920 (1922) assessed the generation of Dreiser, Wharton, and Willa Cather. Many Minds (1924) collected critical essays on American and European writers. His critical monograph on James Branch Cabell (1925) was an important early assessment of that once-celebrated, now-neglected novelist.
Editor and Public Intellectual
Van Doren served as literary editor of The Nation (1919–1922) and as editor of The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–1921), a foundational work of American literary scholarship. He was also editor-in-chief of the Literary Guild, one of the major book clubs of the era.
Benjamin Franklin (1938)
Van Doren’s masterwork is his biography of Benjamin Franklin, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1939. The book is a comprehensive, scholarly, yet highly readable account of Franklin’s extraordinarily multifaceted life — printer, writer, scientist, diplomat, philosopher, and Founding Father — that treats its subject with admiration but not hagiography. Van Doren’s Franklin is a recognisably human figure: ambitious, pragmatic, charming, occasionally vain, and possessed of a genius for self-invention that made him the most modern of the Founders.
The biography remains in print and is still cited as one of the standard Franklin biographies, alongside those by Walter Isaacson and Edmund Morgan.
The Great Rehearsal (1948)
Van Doren’s other major work of historical writing is The Great Rehearsal, an account of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 that argues the framing of the Constitution was a “rehearsal” for the eventual creation of a world government — a thesis that reflected Van Doren’s internationalist ideals in the immediate postwar period.
Secret History of the American Revolution (1941)
This work examines the role of treason, espionage, and betrayal during the American Revolution, with particular attention to Benedict Arnold. It was one of the first serious studies of the intelligence war during the Revolution.
Legacy
Van Doren’s critical works helped establish American literature as a subject worthy of serious academic study at a time when it was regarded as inferior to English literature. His championing of Melville — particularly his recognition that Moby-Dick was a masterpiece rather than a failed novel — contributed to the Melville revival of the 1920s. His biography of Franklin endures as a model of accessible, authoritative biographical writing.
Collecting Van Doren
Benjamin Franklin (1938, Viking) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible. Van Doren’s earlier critical works are scarce but not widely collected. The Cambridge History of American Literature in its original edition is valued by collectors of literary scholarship.