Word: holbrook
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Died. Stewart Holbrook, 71, author and historian, a salty New Englander who in 20 fast-moving, informative volumes on early America (The Age of the Moguls, The Yankee Exodus) often found the human side more interesting than the heroic, serving up such tidbits as Ethan Allen's incurable love of "stonewalls" (cider laced with rum) and the fact that Billy the Kid in real life was a bucktoothed adenoid case; of a stroke; in Portland...
...fellow of King's College, Cambridge, Holbrook, 41, is a teacher who comes straight to the point that "the roots of true literacy are in the child's natural urge to use language to make sense of its life." Scoffing at the "didactic decorum" that dominates English teaching, Holbrook ignores graded vocabularies and grammar drills. "Without 'vocabulary lessons' the child yet extends his vocabulary because he is searching for new concepts. Without lessons in grammar and sentence structure he yet comes to write 'by nature' sentences of such complexity that grammarians would take years...
...with Music. Holbrook sometimes sounds more convinced than convincing, but he produces results. Enacting real life in the classroom, he gets grunting students of the twelve-to-15 age range to talk by staging mock employment interviews and playlets that become psychodramas of family problems. Then he makes them write, often by getting them to describe recorded music ranging from Aaron Copland to Jelly Roll Morton. One girl entering Holbrook's class with a reported IQ of 76 turned out a long, sophisticated lovers' dialogue that John O'Hara would have approved...
...Holbrook's impact on Britain's educational establishment has been heavy. His five anthologies of prose and poetry are used in thousands of state and private schools. Instead of the usual diet of Wordsworth and Silas Marner, the students get kitchen-sink selections from Hemingway on the birth of a baby, D. H. Lawrence on a son's quarrel with his mother, Koestler on a Communist execution, Joyce on a Dublin funeral. Holbrook's first book on education-combining theory, sample student compositions, and Holbrook's interpretations of their efforts-is required reading at most...
14th Century Comfort. A man with a big head and hair that needs to be cut, Holbrook turned to teaching out of necessity in order to finance his creative writing of poetry and criticism after a career at Cambridge as a reader in English under famed Critic F. R. Leavis. Now comfortably settled with his wife and three children in a 14th century cottage in a hamlet near his alma mater, Holbrook earns far more in royalties as an anthologizer and educational gadfly (total sales: 80,000 copies) than he ever did as a teacher or fiction writer...