Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks, Van Wyck (1886–1963), U.S. critic. In America's Coming of Age (1915), he saw the 19th-century United States as torn between the idealistic and the materialistic. He wrote critical biographies of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Emerson. His series Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800–1915, included the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Flowering of New England (1936).