Barrett Wendell and His Letters

M. A. De Wolfe Howe builds his life of Barrett Wendell around Wendell's own correspondence, weaving biographical narrative between long stretches of quoted letters to let a difficult, opinionated Harvard professor reveal himself largely in his own words. The book follows Wendell from his Boston upbringing through his 1877 graduation from Harvard alongside a future university president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and into a teaching career that began in the English department in 1880 and continued, through several ranks, until he retired in 1917, four years before his death, decades in which Wendell helped establish the serious academic study of American literature at a university that had not previously treated the subject as worth a scholar's full attention.

Howe gives real space to Wendell's international reputation, including a year lecturing at Cambridge University and the Sorbonne that produced Wendell's own book on French culture, and to the personal opinions, often sharp, sometimes reactionary by later standards, that filled his private letters on subjects well beyond literature. The correspondence lets Howe show a man whose public role as a respected literary historian and textbook author, A Literary History of America among his best known works, sat alongside a private voice considerably more candid and combative than his classroom reputation suggested.

Reading it means moving between narrative passages and long extracts of Wendell's own writing, a form that asks a reader to build a sense of the man from his letters as much as from Howe's own framing, and it suits anyone interested in the intellectual and academic culture of Harvard at the turn of the twentieth century, when the study of American writing was still finding its footing as a subject worth a professor's career. Howe writes as an editor comfortable letting his subject's own voice carry long stretches of the book rather than constantly interpreting it for the reader.