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Edward Taylor: Poetical Works, Literary History of the United States, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography, The Oxford Companion to American History
Montpelier High School, Dartmouth College, Williams College, Harvard University
Academic work
Discipline
American literature
Sub-discipline
Puritan scholar,Emily Dickinson
Thomas Herbert Johnson (April 27,1902 –January 3,1985) was an Americanscholar,teacher,editor,and bibliographer who specialized in American literature.[1]
His notable contributions include the rediscovery of the Puritan poet Edward Taylor (c.1664–1729),whose complete poems Poetical Works.[2] Johnson edited and published in 1939;his co-editorship of Literary History of the United States.[3] (1948,3 vols.),for which he compiled the third volume,the Bibliography;and his editions of the writings of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) comprising the Poems[4] (1955,3 vols.) and the Letters[5] (1958,3 vols.). In 1955,he also published Emily Dickinson:An Interpretive Biography.[6] Before Johnson’s work,no accurate and complete edition of Dickinson’s poems or letters had been published.[7][8] He also authored The Oxford Companion to American History (1966).[9]
Early life
During his first semester as a freshman at Dartmouth College,he failed in three of his five courses.[10] Given a second chance,he then took ten courses during the 1920–21 academic year,earning four C’s,three D’s,and three E’s. Johnson wrote to President Ernest Martin Hopkins requesting another chance. Hopkins responded that,while finding Johnson's letter compelling,he would not deviate from the school's policy. Johnson wrote to Hopkins,“My greatest,my earliest ambition has been swept away from me because of my own carelessness... only I am to blame.”Johnson began teaching at a rural school in Readsboro at age 19.[11]
In the autumn of 1922,with the help of President Hopkins,he entered Williams College as a freshman. His academic record remained undistinguished until his senior year.[12] By the time Johnson graduated from Williams in 1926,he had been elected to the Gargoyle honors society and served as the president of the college's theatrical group,Cap and Bells.[13][14]
In 1926–27,Johnson participated as a teacher in an around-the-world academic cruise known as the Floating University. The program,led by a faculty including Howes of Williams College as one of three deans,brought together more than fifty instructors and approximately 450 students,including 120 women. The initiative was designed to combine formal education with international travel,involving participants from both elite colleges and state universities across the United States,and was regularly covered by the New York Times. During the voyage,Johnson wrote a series of 34 letters addressed primarily to his mother,though also intended for his father,younger brother Edward (“Ned”),and older sister Ruth.[15]
Early career
Thomas Johnson completed his M.A. degree at Harvard University in 1929 and earned a Ph.D. in 1934. He wrote on colonial literature in Jonathan Edwards:Representative Selections,[16] edited with Clarence Faust of the University of Chicago,followed by The Puritans,[17] authored with Perry Miller of Harvard in 1938. According to Kermit Vanderbilt in his American Literature and the Academy,Johnson "made an impact on American literature studies" in 1939,introducing "the scholarly world to the verses of Edward Taylor,four hundred pages of manuscripts that had lain over two centuries in Yale University archives.”[18] Johnson’s scholarship was released as The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor[2] in 1939.
Thomas Johnson reading a newspaper
He then contributed to Literary History of the United States,[3] that published in three volumes by Macmillan in 1948,a collaboration with Robert E. Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania,Willard Thorp of Princeton and Henry Seidel Canby,founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. Johnson compiled the third volume Bibliography. Vanderbilt wrote that although “Thomas Johnson was not the foremost bibliographer on the American literature scene when Spiller and Thorp drove down from Princeton to nearby Lawrenceville School in 1942 and persuaded him to join the editorial board in that capacity," Johnson "had more than modest credentials and was,in addition,the foremost scholar of New England literature among all the contributors. He was,in fact,a New Englander. . . .”[18]
The publication of the Literary History[3] helped to establish that America had its own literature,with writers who were distinctly American and wrote on American themes. Subsequently,American professors were invited to European universities to establish courses on American Literature.
Later career
Johnson was invited by Harvard University Press to work on a new edition of Emily Dickinson. R. W. Franklin,in his introduction to the 1998 Variorum edition,described Johnson’s 1955 edition as "a landmark in Dickinson studies [...] an outstanding achievement [...] essential to Dickinson scholarship for over forty years."[19]
In 1966,his last major work,The Oxford Companion to American History,[9] was published. Alexander R. Butler,in his review in The New Republic,wrote that "the book invites browsing" for which Johnson has set an exceptionally high standard for his possible successors. [...] He has the ability to suggest with a few words a wild variety of historical viewpoints so that the biographies and articles,short though they do not emphasize the facts themselves but the interpretations of the facts."[20]
Johnson working in his home study in Lawrenceville,New Jersey
Johnson retired in 1967. That year,The Lawrentian wrote of him,"But he is first and foremost teacher [...] Those of us who are fortunate to know him well all know of the pleasure he takes in his writing and his research but we know better his pleasure in his classes,his talk of boys who do well &his concern for the less-gifted,and his encyclopedic knowledge of the language;literature that he loves to teach."[21] Vanderbilt characterized Johnson as having "clearly thrived on the alternation between prep-school instruction and the intense concentration demanded of textual and bibliographical scholarship."[22]
1 2 Taylor, Edward (1939). Johnson, Thomas (ed.). The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor. New York, NY: Rockland Editions.
1 2 3 Johnson, Thomas; Spiller, Robert; Thorp, Willard; Seidel Canby, Henry, eds. (1948). Literary History of the United States. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.
↑ Dickinson, Emily (1955). Johnson, Thomas (ed.). The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
↑ Dickinson, Emily (1958). Johnson, Thomas; Ward, Theodora (eds.). The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
↑ Johnson, Thomas (1967). Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. New York, NY: Atheneum.
↑ Johnson, Thomas H. (1955). The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Including Variant Readings Critically Compared with All Known Manuscripts. Vol.1. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p.ix. Until the present edition, no attempt has been made to establish an accurate and complete text of all the poems.
↑ Johnson, Thomas H.; Ward, Theodora (1958). The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p.v. This is the first collected edition of all the known letters of Emily Dickinson.
1 2 Johnson, Thomas (1966). The Oxford Companion to American History. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
↑ Material pertaining to Thomas H. Johnson’s time at Dartmouth College is in the collections of the Bunn Library at the Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, N.J.
↑ Thomas Johnson’s diary for the year he taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Readsboro, VT., is in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society.
↑ "Cap and Bells". Special Collections. Retrieved February 18, 2025.
↑ The letters Thomas Johnson wrote his family during this around-the-world trip are in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society. See also Laura Johnson Waterman’s, “Writing Home from Around the World, 1926-1927,” Vermont History, Vol. 76, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2008.
↑ Edwards, Jonathan (1935). Johnson, Thomas; Faust, Clarence (eds.). Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections. New York, NY: American Writers Series.
↑ Johnson, Thomas; Miller, Perry (1938). The Puritans. New York, NY: American Book Company.
1 2 Vanderbilt, Kermit, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA., 1986, p. 443.
↑ R. W. Franklin, editor, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum edition, Cambridge Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
↑ Butler, Alexander R., “History from Abbe to Zworykin,” The New Republic, 15 October 1966, p. 22.
↑ "Teacher-Scholar: Thomas H. Johnson, Ph.D.," The Lawrentian, Winter 1967, pp. 14-15.
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