Word: van
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Hence, for any plain reader who may have been scared away by Author Brooks's reputation as the nation's most distinguished literary critic, Irving is an excellent place to begin his history. Van Wyck (rhymes with bike) Brooks is no mere dissector of dead tomes. In Irving, as in its two predecessors, the task which he has set himself is nothing less than to recreate the whole intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the period. Few Americans will read it without a thrill of discovery at learning how much more lively, vigorous and original an intellectual life...
...pirates. With his successful older brothers making life easy for him, Irving took his lawyer's career lightly. He had only one client, and neglected him. But he knew the old Dutch legends of the Hudson, cheerfully lampooned the Ten Eycks and Author Brooks's forebears the Van Wycks, hunted and fished through the farms and forests of Scarsdale and Tarrytown. He excelled at descriptive writing, became a model of English prose more popular than Addison...
...such richly colorful material, woven into a narrative that is never schematic, and yet never a mere miscellaneous grab bag of historical information, is Van Wyck Brooks's book constructed. Its individual word-portraits-of Alexander Wilson, the dour ornithologist and bird-painter, of Davy Crockett, teller of tall backwoods tales, who thought they made a book "jump out of the press like a new dollar from a mint-hopper," of Fenimore Cooper, whose father gave him 23 farms in New York State when the future novelist was expelled from Yale-are equal to Brooks's best...
...Author. Van Wyck Brooks's literary career began with a trip to England when he was twelve. Born in Plainfield, NJ. in 1886, the son of a New York stockbroker, he read Ruskin in England, dreamed of himself writing a history of painting some day. He never wrote it, and his first published work, like that of many of his generation, appeared in St. Nicholas...
...best of American writers had fallen so far short of the possibilities of their genius. As he worked on his biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James, finding more & more evidence of the personal tragedies of individual writers, and more & more signs of the faltering of their boldest ventures, Van Wyck Brooks produced studies of intellectual failure which were as terrifying to creative writers as the horror stories...