The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865
by Van Wyck Brooks
Summary
Van Wyck Brooks opens The Flowering of New England in 1815 and closes it in 1865, tracing the fifty years in which a relatively small, provincial region produced an outsized share of nineteenth century America's defining writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow among them. Brooks treats the period not as a series of separate literary careers but as one connected cultural flowering, following the intellectual currents, friendships, rivalries, and shared institutions, Harvard, the Transcendentalist circle, the Boston and Concord literary worlds, that let so many major writers emerge from the same small corner of the country within a single generation.
Brooks builds the book from densely researched biographical detail woven into narrative prose closer to storytelling than to conventional academic history, moving between individual writers' lives and the shared cultural moment that shaped all of them together. He had already spent years arguing, in earlier essays, that America lacked a usable cultural past worth building on, and this book reads in part as his own answer to that argument: a demonstration that New England, at least for this one stretch of decades, had produced exactly the coherent, serious literary tradition he had once claimed the country was missing.
Reading the book means following a critic's warm, anecdote rich account of how a literary culture actually forms, told through the overlapping lives of writers who knew each other, argued with each other, and shaped each other's work directly rather than in isolation. It suits a reader who wants literary history told as connected human story, the friendships and arguments behind the books, rather than as separate studies of individual authors read one at a time.
Historical Context & Significance
The Flowering of New England won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History and a National Book Award for Nonfiction, an unusual double for a work more often read today as literary criticism than as history in the narrower sense. Life magazine later included it among the hundred outstanding books published between 1924 and 1944, recognition of how widely the book was read outside academic circles.
The book became the first installment of Brooks's five volume Makers and Finders series, which he continued across the following decades with New England: Indian Summer in 1940, The World of Washington Irving in 1944, The Times of Melville and Whitman in 1947, and The Confident Years, 1885 to 1915, in 1952, together tracing the development of American literature from this New England flowering through the turn of the twentieth century. Brooks had earlier argued, in the influential 1918 essay On Creating a Usable Past, that American writers lacked a serious cultural tradition to draw on, and the Makers and Finders project, beginning with this Pulitzer winning volume, became his own extended attempt to write that tradition into being.