Benjamin Franklin was an American polymath who was active as a writer, scientist, inventor, statesman, diplomat, printer, publisher, and political philosopher. Among the leading intellectuals of his time, Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, a drafter and signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the first postmaster general.
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet and writer, who was associated with the modernist school of poetry. MacLeish studied English at Yale University and law at Harvard University. He enlisted in and saw action during the First World War and lived in Paris in the 1920s. On returning to the United States, he contributed to Henry Luce's magazine Fortune from 1929 to 1938. For five years, MacLeish was the ninth Librarian of Congress, a post he accepted at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. From 1949 to 1962, he was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.
Sidney Coe Howard was an American playwright, dramatist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1925 and a posthumous Academy Award in 1940 for the screenplay for Gone with the Wind.
Carl Clinton Van Doren was an American critic and biographer. He was the brother of critic and teacher Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren.
Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and critic. He was a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was literary editor of The Nation, in New York City (1924–1928), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.
Viking Press is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim and then acquired by the Penguin Group in 1975.
Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr. was an American historian, social critic, and public intellectual. The son of the influential historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. and a specialist in American history, much of Schlesinger's work explored the history of 20th-century American liberalism. In particular, his work focused on leaders such as Harry S. Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Robert F. Kennedy. In the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, he was a primary speechwriter and adviser to the Democratic presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson II. Schlesinger served as special assistant and "court historian" to President Kennedy from 1961 to 1963. He wrote a detailed account of the Kennedy administration, from the 1960 presidential campaign to the president's state funeral, titled A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.
Van Wyck Brooks was an American literary critic, biographer, and historian.
Irita Bradford Van Doren was an American literary figure and editor of the New York Herald Tribune book review for 37 years.
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1939
The following are the Pulitzer Prizes for 1940.
Carl Benjamin Boyer was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."
Frank Luther Mott was an American academic, historian and journalist, who won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for History for Volumes II and III of his series, A History of American Magazines.
Jane Franklin Mecom was the youngest sister of Benjamin Franklin and was considered one of his closest confidants. Mecom and Franklin corresponded for sixty-three years, throughout the course of Ben Franklin's life, and some of their letters survive.
Odell Shepard was an American professor, poet, and politician who was the 86th Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut from 1941 to 1943. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1938.
Joseph Paul Lash was an American radical political activist, journalist, and writer. A close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, Lash won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award in Biography for Eleanor and Franklin (1971), the first of two volumes he wrote about the former First Lady.
Louis Rudolph Harlan was an American academic historian who wrote a two-volume biography of the African-American educator and social leader Booker T. Washington and edited several volumes of Washington materials. He won the Bancroft Prize in 1973 and 1984, once for each volume, and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for the second volume.
Lawrance Roger Thompson 3 April 1906 — 15 April 1973) was an American academic at Princeton University from the 1930s to 1970s. Apart from World War II, Thompson primarily taught English from 1939 to 1968 before teaching Belles-lettres from 1968 until his 1973 retirement. Outside of academics, Thompson wrote multiple books on American poets including a three-part biography on Robert Frost. Thompson's first part of his biography on Frost, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915 was nominated for the 1967 National Book Award for Arts and Letters. Years later, Thompson won the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his second part of his biography titled Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938. After Thompson died in 1973 while writing the final part of his Frost biography, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963 was posthumously completed by Thompson's assistant R.H. Winnick in 1976.
The Papers of Benjamin Franklin is a collaborative effort by a team of scholars at Yale University, American Philosophical Society and others who have searched, collected, edited, and published the numerous letters from and to Benjamin Franklin, and other works, especially those involved with the American Revolutionary period and thereafter. The publication of Franklin's papers has been an ongoing production since its first issue in 1959, and is expected to reach nearly fifty volumes, with more than forty volumes completed as of 2022. The costly project was made possible from donations by the American Philosophical Association and Life magazine.
The Bibliography of Benjamin Franklin is a comprehensive list of primary and secondary works by or about Benjamin Franklin, one of the principal Founding Fathers of the United States. Works about Franklin have been consistently published during and after Franklin's life, spanning four centuries, and continue to appear in present-day publications. Scholarly works that are not necessarily subject-specific to Franklin, yet cover his life and efforts in significant measure, may also be included here. In contrast, this bibliography does not include the numerous encyclopedia articles and short essays about Franklin..
