Main Currents in American Thought
by Vernon Louis Parrington
Summary
Vernon Louis Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought reads three centuries of American writing as a running argument about political and economic power rather than as a story of literary style developing on its own terms. Parrington divides that argument into three broad phases he calls Calvinist pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic pessimism, and treats democratic idealism, the conviction that ordinary people should govern themselves rather than defer to inherited authority, as the thread running underneath all three, shaping how American writers thought about government, property, and human nature across three hundred years.
The Pulitzer Prize recognized the first two volumes, covering the colonial period through the years leading into the Civil War, work Parrington built while teaching first at the University of Oklahoma and then at the University of Washington, where he spent the second half of his career. He reads writers as political actors as much as literary ones, judging Puritans, Federalists, Jacksonians, and reformers by where their ideas placed them in an ongoing struggle between democratic and aristocratic instincts in American life, a framework that let him treat minor pamphleteers and canonical authors as evidence in the same argument.
Parrington died before finishing the planned third volume, which associates completed from his notes and published after his death, so the full trilogy carries the weight of an argument its author did not live to see through to its own ending. Reading the finished volumes means following literary history written with genuine political conviction rather than critical detachment, and it suits a reader more interested in what American writers believed about power and democracy than in close readings of their prose style alone.
Historical Context & Significance
Main Currents in American Thought won the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for History for its first two volumes, the only portion Parrington completed and saw published in his own lifetime. He died suddenly in England in June 1929 with the third volume roughly half finished, and colleagues and former students brought it into publishable shape for a 1930 release that closed out the trilogy after its author was gone.
The book dominated American literary and cultural criticism from its publication through the early 1950s, shaping a generation of scholars who read literature primarily through political and economic history, and Parrington is credited with helping found the American studies movement that grew out of exactly that approach. His reputation fell sharply in the following decades as critics including Lionel Trilling and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. argued the book's political framework had crowded out serious attention to writers like Jonathan Edwards and Henry James, whose work fit its argument poorly, a debate that still shapes how historians of American criticism read Parrington today.