Word: devoto
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Semi-Educated. DeVoto's battles began early. The "child of an apostate Mormon and an apostate Catholic," he entered the University of Utah at 17, founded...
...Twain papers, produced three books (Mark Twain's America, Mark Twain in Eruption, Mark Twain at Work) that rescued Twain from the pryings of psychoanalytical critics. His interest in Twain was characteristic of his down-to-earth Americanism: while his fellow writers were busy exiling themselves to Europe, DeVoto remained stubbornly rooted...
...they saw around them was only their own. He despised writers with delusions about the writer's importance ("The importance of literary people is chiefly to one another"), and he insisted that literary criticism was "an activity in which uncontrolled speculation is virtuous and responsibility is almost impossible." DeVoto was a man in search of facts. The facts he liked best: those that lay behind the building of America...
...came to know as much about the opening of the American West as any man alive. His The Year of Decision: 1846 and The Course of Empire reopened that West for thousands of readers, and his Across the Wide Missouri won him the 1948 Pulitzer Prize in history. Actually DeVoto was historian to the whole nation. "I'm fed up," he once said, "with being thought of as a writer of only Western history. The general impression is that DeVoto is some kind of tributary to the Missouri River...
...Dumb to Know. In whatever he did, Bernard DeVoto was tributary to nothing. He was father confessor to scores of Harvard students who, he thought, had a sincere desire to be writers. But when it came to sham-either academic or political-he could be merciless. Occasionally, his reputation for sounding off on everything, whether big or small, tended to becloud his reputation as a serious scholar...