Word: wyck
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Roots of American Culture, edited after her death by Critic Van Wyck Brooks, includes eight essays. One examines the esthetic opinions of Founding Fathers Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, John Adams, and the culture of their time. One is an almost book-length study of the early American theater. One is a shorter companion piece on music. One is about the Shakers, who became "a folk" in one generation, then all but died out, due to their insistence on celibacy, in another. There are minor pieces on Negro tradition, folklore, the early U.S. genre painter Voltaire Combe, and the possible future...
Bustle-Ridden Rabelais. The myth of Mark Twain as a frustrated, bustle-ridden Rabelais (see Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain) is nearly dead. DeVoto has done more than any other critic to kill that petticoat ghost, but in this book, with fresh evidence at hand, he gives it another kicking around. The author of the ribald 1601-itself a symptom of inhibition-needed neither his staid friend William Dean Howells nor his gentle wife Olivia to wash out his mouth with soap. Mark Twain, says DeVoto, "was almost lustfully hypersensitive to sex in print...
...Conductors. Besides being, with the exception of Walter's book on Mahler, the sole piece of intelligent prose published by a major American conductor on musical history or theory for the last ten years, it reveals Boston's Bayard as a keen historical analyst with broad-based Van-Wyck-Brooksian sympathies. This may seem like the introduction of strange standards, as if I were to attribute Joe Louis's technique to a knowledge of boxing history, and, in the case of a composer, it would be. A composer, after mastering the fundamentals, should be a law to himself, developing consistently...
Gould, Aubrey Van Wyck...
...book a man could trust in navigating a ship." "Eventually there was to be a 'Bowditch' in most sea chests, and the ship's officer and the seaman were to spread the name of the Yankee navigator with the trade winds and the monsoons." And Van Wyck Brooks praised old Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's book on puerperal fever by saying that it had probably saved as many human lives as Bowditch's book...