What do you think?
Rate this book
Makers and Finders #2
New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915
Sequel to The Flowering of New England. Great American Literature History.
558 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1940
About the author
Van Wyck Brooks
119 books12 followersVan Wyck Brooks was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on February 16, 1886. His parents, Sally and Charles Brooks were well off, and as a result Van Wyck was able to get a good primary education. Van Wyck eventually ended up in Harvard University, from where he graduated in 1908.
Van Wyck Brooks became well known through his work as a literary critic, although he generally is not considered an author of literary works himself.
Brooks is also well known through his work as a historian of American literature during the 19th century, and he produced a series of studies, which were known and published as the “Makers and Finders” series.
One of his books, The Flowering of New England, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1937.
Van Wyck Brooks became well known through his work as a literary critic, although he generally is not considered an author of literary works himself.
Brooks is also well known through his work as a historian of American literature during the 19th century, and he produced a series of studies, which were known and published as the “Makers and Finders” series.
One of his books, The Flowering of New England, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1937.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 20, 2020
Van Wyck Brooks used to be a big deal. He was a Pulitzer Prize winner and a major critic, an influence on the emerging field of American Studies. The early American Studies scholars had a few goals in mind: combatting both right- and left- (but mostly left-) wing radicalism in American culture, proving America’s cultural weightiness as opposed to European stereotypes of cultureless Americans, and creating a sort of high-middlebrow American monoculture to incorporate immigrants, the working classes, and new generations into safely.
I don’t know how much Brooks actually participated in American Studies, which was a pretty well-organized (and CIA-backed) enterprise from the beginning; Brooks seems to have been an “independent scholar,” i.e. a rich guy who could do research, write, and get published by respectable outlets without institutional help. But the monoculture thing is definitely part of Brooks’ project in these two books. Between them, “The Flowering of New England” and “Indian Summer” cover a century of literary history in New England, the years between 1815 and 1915. They follow a sort of sine-wave pattern- rise, fallow period, lesser reconstitution, of New England influence over American culture, particularly but not solely writing.
But he doesn’t make straightforward arguments about why New England “flowered” or went fallow as it did, he doesn’t try to empirically measure New England’s literary influence, even qualitatively, and he only barely lays out a thesis to the books at all, and not in an introduction, where you figure it would go. He writes very flowingly and impressionistically, dedicating chapters to writers or artists and their circles in rough chronological order, stopping in at certain hot spots (Cambridge, Concord) from time to time. In the first book, “The Flowering of New England,” he puts a lot of emphasis on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, and it bleeds into his writing, both structurally and stylistically, not for the better. I never cared for either one, seeing them as individualistic phoney philosophers, jumped-up graduation speakers, and Brooks did not change my mind.
As it turns out, Brooks was borrowing heavily from German historian/pseudo-philosopher Oswald Spengler. He rejects Spengler’s racism (though his books aren’t free of patronizing attitudes to black people and Native Americans, and his literary New England is blindingly white), but uses something like his theory of how cultural spaces develop in history. “Culture cities” like Florence or Bruges in the Renaissance, Spengler argued, came from a concatenation of sources: a certain degree of wealth and power (not too much!), connection with “the soil,” meaning with a specific place, and a kind of spark of genius provided by rubbing those together with a broadly educated public, and hey presto! You’ve got yourself a “culture city.” Insofar as the model makes any sense and isn’t idealistic gobbledegook, it applies perfectly well to Boston/Cambridge/Concord in the nineteenth century, which did indeed have all of those things going for it (though I tend to think the real genius was Herman Melville, who get short shrift from Brooks, possibly because he bailed to New York when the opportunity came). Decline came in the post-Civil War era, when people (well, rich New Englanders, but that’s “people” as far as Brooks is concerned) gained interest in making money and marriages and lost interest in causes and greatness. This produced a sort of subsidiary bounce of genius as figures like the James brothers and Henry Adams portrayed and criticized this society, but in the end, we are left looking wistfully back at the genius of New England now eaten by the maw of modernity.
I read these books as part of a project on the intellectual history of New England, how it constituted (and constitutes) itself by the light of ideas. Brooks’ project here was part of a bid to make the literary history of New England part of a broader monoculture for America as a whole, a civilizing project for the unwashed masses, the kind of thing some of Brooks’ characters would take up. Obviously, I am not part of this project, nor am I especially sympathetic to it, though I do think people could benefit from looking at literature once thought “canonical,” both on its own merits and for historical purposes.
I guess what I got out of this was more archaeological than anything. The ruins of a lost civilization, or rather, two: the New England of the American Renaissance (scholars prefer the broader term, incorporating non-New England figures, than the “Flowering” metaphor Brooks used), and the mid-twentieth century literary Americanism project. It’s like you need to decode the latter before you can get at the former in Brooks’ work. This is basically pointless to the modern reader because others (Louis Menand, David Reynolds, probably loads more) cover much the same ground but don’t expect you to know or care who these triple-named Yankees are before they explain why. In Brooks, it’s assumed you know most of them and care. I try to imagine even scholarly friends of mine reading these books and I get the idea of a comical morass, like the begets of the Bible or the sludgier portions of the Silmarillion, though Brooks does have some nice turns of phrase. You can see the accomplishment here — I don’t know if I got this across, but the books are really exhaustive, as far as white upper-class New England literature goes — but I don’t think Van Wyck Brooks is going to make his way back from obscurity any time too soon. ***
I don’t know how much Brooks actually participated in American Studies, which was a pretty well-organized (and CIA-backed) enterprise from the beginning; Brooks seems to have been an “independent scholar,” i.e. a rich guy who could do research, write, and get published by respectable outlets without institutional help. But the monoculture thing is definitely part of Brooks’ project in these two books. Between them, “The Flowering of New England” and “Indian Summer” cover a century of literary history in New England, the years between 1815 and 1915. They follow a sort of sine-wave pattern- rise, fallow period, lesser reconstitution, of New England influence over American culture, particularly but not solely writing.
But he doesn’t make straightforward arguments about why New England “flowered” or went fallow as it did, he doesn’t try to empirically measure New England’s literary influence, even qualitatively, and he only barely lays out a thesis to the books at all, and not in an introduction, where you figure it would go. He writes very flowingly and impressionistically, dedicating chapters to writers or artists and their circles in rough chronological order, stopping in at certain hot spots (Cambridge, Concord) from time to time. In the first book, “The Flowering of New England,” he puts a lot of emphasis on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau, and it bleeds into his writing, both structurally and stylistically, not for the better. I never cared for either one, seeing them as individualistic phoney philosophers, jumped-up graduation speakers, and Brooks did not change my mind.
As it turns out, Brooks was borrowing heavily from German historian/pseudo-philosopher Oswald Spengler. He rejects Spengler’s racism (though his books aren’t free of patronizing attitudes to black people and Native Americans, and his literary New England is blindingly white), but uses something like his theory of how cultural spaces develop in history. “Culture cities” like Florence or Bruges in the Renaissance, Spengler argued, came from a concatenation of sources: a certain degree of wealth and power (not too much!), connection with “the soil,” meaning with a specific place, and a kind of spark of genius provided by rubbing those together with a broadly educated public, and hey presto! You’ve got yourself a “culture city.” Insofar as the model makes any sense and isn’t idealistic gobbledegook, it applies perfectly well to Boston/Cambridge/Concord in the nineteenth century, which did indeed have all of those things going for it (though I tend to think the real genius was Herman Melville, who get short shrift from Brooks, possibly because he bailed to New York when the opportunity came). Decline came in the post-Civil War era, when people (well, rich New Englanders, but that’s “people” as far as Brooks is concerned) gained interest in making money and marriages and lost interest in causes and greatness. This produced a sort of subsidiary bounce of genius as figures like the James brothers and Henry Adams portrayed and criticized this society, but in the end, we are left looking wistfully back at the genius of New England now eaten by the maw of modernity.
I read these books as part of a project on the intellectual history of New England, how it constituted (and constitutes) itself by the light of ideas. Brooks’ project here was part of a bid to make the literary history of New England part of a broader monoculture for America as a whole, a civilizing project for the unwashed masses, the kind of thing some of Brooks’ characters would take up. Obviously, I am not part of this project, nor am I especially sympathetic to it, though I do think people could benefit from looking at literature once thought “canonical,” both on its own merits and for historical purposes.
I guess what I got out of this was more archaeological than anything. The ruins of a lost civilization, or rather, two: the New England of the American Renaissance (scholars prefer the broader term, incorporating non-New England figures, than the “Flowering” metaphor Brooks used), and the mid-twentieth century literary Americanism project. It’s like you need to decode the latter before you can get at the former in Brooks’ work. This is basically pointless to the modern reader because others (Louis Menand, David Reynolds, probably loads more) cover much the same ground but don’t expect you to know or care who these triple-named Yankees are before they explain why. In Brooks, it’s assumed you know most of them and care. I try to imagine even scholarly friends of mine reading these books and I get the idea of a comical morass, like the begets of the Bible or the sludgier portions of the Silmarillion, though Brooks does have some nice turns of phrase. You can see the accomplishment here — I don’t know if I got this across, but the books are really exhaustive, as far as white upper-class New England literature goes — but I don’t think Van Wyck Brooks is going to make his way back from obscurity any time too soon. ***
June 5, 2021
This is the second volume of Van Wyck Brooks's Makers and Finders series. The first volume, The Flowering of New England 1815 1865 covered the period to the cend of the Civil War, while New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 takes the story to the start of World War One. In this second period, the story is much less cohesive, as what began as an interconnected movement becomes diffuse and disoriented.
What saves the book is Brooks's erudition. In how many books that you've read have you been enthusiastic about reading all the footnotes? In this book, some of Brooks's best writing appears in fine print at the bottom. I kept taking notes of books I never heard of that I wanted to read.
Although the earlier volume is better, Brooks made the decay of the Boston-based literary movement interesting and vital. And, at the end, with such figures as Robert Frost, he shows New England once again coming into its own.
What I will probably remember most about this volume are the literary careers of William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, and Henry James -- three giants who, though they did not form a cohesive movement of any sort, contributed greatly to the literature of the fin de siecle.
What saves the book is Brooks's erudition. In how many books that you've read have you been enthusiastic about reading all the footnotes? In this book, some of Brooks's best writing appears in fine print at the bottom. I kept taking notes of books I never heard of that I wanted to read.
Although the earlier volume is better, Brooks made the decay of the Boston-based literary movement interesting and vital. And, at the end, with such figures as Robert Frost, he shows New England once again coming into its own.
What I will probably remember most about this volume are the literary careers of William Dean Howells, Henry Adams, and Henry James -- three giants who, though they did not form a cohesive movement of any sort, contributed greatly to the literature of the fin de siecle.
August 18, 2022
Enjoyable to read, packed with observations about the writers and lives that made American literature, Van Wyck Brooks is everything I'd hope for in a nonfiction storyteller. Before I finished this book. I had already purchased more by the same author. Worth rereading, simply to absorb all the information.
January 27, 2016
Brooks does a good job of giving not only a sense of the cultural and literary history of the period between 1865 and 1915, but when he's at his best he also gives a felt sense of that period -- the look of rooms and houses, the way winter and summer feel, the everyday things the literary people of the time lived with.
I would have given this book 5 stars except that in this book Brooks seems too busy to slow down his narrative and give us that sensory history.
He seems to be rushing to get down all the info in his notes and footnotes about the chief literary and cultural figureheads before he forgets who they are.
As a result, instead of that earlier measured pace that we see in his earlier books, Brooks here seems too often pledged to footnotes.
I would have given this book 5 stars except that in this book Brooks seems too busy to slow down his narrative and give us that sensory history.
He seems to be rushing to get down all the info in his notes and footnotes about the chief literary and cultural figureheads before he forgets who they are.
As a result, instead of that earlier measured pace that we see in his earlier books, Brooks here seems too often pledged to footnotes.
November 1, 2019
As with the previous volume, "The Flowering of New England", Van Wyck Brooks delivers succulent prose as he surveys the literature and through it the history of New England and by extension, the United States---in fact to a good measure, the world.
Perhaps, to the modern reader, the most salient feature of the book is the plentitude of footnotes, which appear in the text rather than being exile to the rear of the work. They add immeasurable value to the reading, supplying act and insight on almost every page for most of the book.
Germane to today are the passages addressing the struggle going on between the Boston based New England literati and the coarser ideas fermenting in the rocky soil of the northeast and the fertile acres spread across the country: arguments such as we hear today.
I first visited with Van Wyck Brooks in the present volume in 1970, 3 decades after it was published. Having let almost five decades pass, I find I now understand many more references and have visited more places here and in Europe: the book is richer still for the time passed. I would need a decade to read all the titles and authors he so smoothly covers and I have never read. I come from parents New England born, bred and educated, as was I, although my time there constitutes a small part of my years. Never-the-less I resonate with these pages.
Recommended
Perhaps, to the modern reader, the most salient feature of the book is the plentitude of footnotes, which appear in the text rather than being exile to the rear of the work. They add immeasurable value to the reading, supplying act and insight on almost every page for most of the book.
Germane to today are the passages addressing the struggle going on between the Boston based New England literati and the coarser ideas fermenting in the rocky soil of the northeast and the fertile acres spread across the country: arguments such as we hear today.
I first visited with Van Wyck Brooks in the present volume in 1970, 3 decades after it was published. Having let almost five decades pass, I find I now understand many more references and have visited more places here and in Europe: the book is richer still for the time passed. I would need a decade to read all the titles and authors he so smoothly covers and I have never read. I come from parents New England born, bred and educated, as was I, although my time there constitutes a small part of my years. Never-the-less I resonate with these pages.
Recommended
October 7, 2016
This is what one would call an "imaginative history": not exactly fanfiction, but definitely self-indulgent in its interpretation of facts. Perhaps the best way I can describe its style/method: this is a New England book about New England books that really wants to be one of the books it's about. The value here is mostly for thinking about the period in which it was written, rather than the period it is about.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews