John Crowe Ransom was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.
Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Cleanth Brooks was an American literary critic and professor. He is best known for his contributions to New Criticism in the mid-20th century and for revolutionizing the teaching of poetry in American higher education. His best-known works, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) and Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), argue for the centrality of ambiguity and paradox as a way of understanding poetry. With his writing, Brooks helped to formulate formalist criticism, emphasizing "the interior life of a poem" and codifying the principles of close reading.
The Fugitives also known as The Fugitive Poets, is the name given to a group of poets and literary scholars at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who published a literary magazine from 1922 to 1925 called The Fugitive. The group, primarily driven by Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, and Allen Tate, formed a major school of twentieth century poetry in the United States. With it, a major period of modern Southern literature began. Their poetry was formal and featured traditional prosody and concrete imagery often from experiences of the rural south. The group has some overlap with two later groups Southern Agrarians and New Criticism.
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.
Randall Jarrelljə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
Vernon Louis Parrington was an American literary historian, scholar, and college football coach. His three-volume history of American letters, Main Currents in American Thought, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 and was one of the most influential books for American historians of its time. Parrington taught at the College of Emporia, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Washington. He was also the head football coach at the College of Emporia from 1893 to 1896 and Oklahoma from 1897 to 1900. Parrington founded the American studies movement in 1927.
Anthony Evan Hecht was an American poet. His work combined a deep interest in form with a passionate desire to confront the horrors of 20th century history, with the Second World War, in which he fought, and the Holocaust being recurrent themes in his work.
The Kenyon Review is a literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, US, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959. The Review has published early works by generations of important writers, including Robert Penn Warren, Ford Madox Ford, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Flannery O'Connor, Boris Pasternak, Bertolt Brecht, Peter Taylor, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Hecht, Maya Angelou, Rita Dove, Derek Walcott, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Woody Allen, Louise Erdrich, William Empson, Linda Gregg, Mark Van Doren, Kenneth Burke, and Ha Jin.
Gordon Keith Chalmers was a scholar of seventeenth-century English thought and letters, president of Rockford College and Kenyon College, and a national leader in American higher education.
Robie Mayhew Macauley was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned more than 50 years.
Steven Paul Marcus was an American academic and literary critic who published influential psychoanalytic analyses of the novels of Charles Dickens and Victorian pornography. He was George Delacorte Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Columbia University.
Eugene "Gene" Paul Nassar, was a writer, editor, professor, and literary critic. He was a professor emeritus of english at Utica College, Utica, New York.
Edwin Mims (1872–1959) was an American university professor of English literature. He served as the Chair of the English Department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee for thirty years from 1912 to 1942, and he taught many members of the Fugitives and the Southern Agrarians, two literary movements in the South. He was a staunch opponent of lynching and a practicing Methodist.
Edward Alexander was an American essayist and professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He focused his research on literary figures such as John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, John Morley, John Ruskin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and Robert B. Heilman; and authored books about Jewish history, Zionism, and antisemitism.
Albert Spaulding Cook was a noted American literary critic, poet, classical scholar, teacher and translator. He taught Classics, English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, Western Reserve, the University at Buffalo and Brown University, as well as at various universities abroad.
George William Lanning Jr. was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned the 1950s through the 1980s.
The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950) is a collection of sixteen essays by American literary critic Lionel Trilling, published by Viking in 1950. The book was edited by Pascal Covici, who had worked with Trilling when he edited and introduced Viking's Portable Matthew Arnold in 1949. With the exception of the preface, which was written specifically for the publication of the book, all the essays included in The Liberal Imagination were individually published in the decade before the book's publication in literary and critical journals, such as The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and The American Quarterly. The essays represent Trilling's written work and critical thoughts of the 1940s.
John Anderson Thompson, Jr. was an American professor, poet, literary critic and writer whose literary career spanned sixty years, from 1938 to 1998.
