V. L. Parrington by H. Lark Hall

Author:H. Lark Hall [Hall, H. Lark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351300261
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

“A Literary Refugee Among the Drilled Hosts of the Historians"

Despite the Macmillan literary adviser’s opinion that colonial America had been “raked fore and aft many times,” he remembered Parrington’s particular raking sufficiently to mention “The Democratic Spirit” to Carl Van Doren. Van Doren was then teaching at Columbia’s Brearly School and serving as one of four editors of The Cambridge History of American Literature. Modeled on the fourteen-volume Cambridge History of English Literature, the American Cambridge History was the first collaborative work in the field, with chapters written by experts in various chronological and thematic areas of American literature. Its best-known recent predecessors in literary history were widely varied in viewpoint and organization: Barrett Wendell’s Literary History of America, William B. Cairns’s History of American Literature, John Macy’s Spirit of American Literature, and college texts by F. L. Pattee.

In mid-January of 1915, Van Doren wrote to Parrington asking him to submit to the editors the manuscript sections treating “the Puritan divines to the death of Cotton Mather.” Parrington promptly responded and was awarded a contract for an eight-thousand-word chapter by the end of February. By mid-March, he was complaining that the word limit was cramping. Van Doren attempted to assuage his complaints by observing that many of the problems of colonial writers had been dealt with in the Cambridge History’s English volumes, that the two volumes (eventually three) reserved for the American phase “were probably proportionate on the basis of importance,” and that “under the circumstances we are doing all we can to represent the American spirit, but it is simply impossible to undertake the culture history which we should like and which should certainly be done, sometime, by someone.”28

Van Doren’s former observations may have been a red flag to a champion of American literature, but his last statement regarding writing “culture history” may well have appeared as a green light. For Parrington had revised and completed “The Democratic Spirit in American Letters” by the spring of 1916. In the meantime, despite the unfavorable space limitations, Parrington submitted his chapter, “The Puritan Divines, 1620–1720.” When the first volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature was published in 1917, he appeared in the company of such recognized figures as literary critic Paul Elmer Moore and historian John Spencer Bassett as well as the four editors (Van Doren, John Erskine, William Peterfield Trent, and Stuart Pratt Sherman), all of whom contributed chapters and had published in the field. In fact, Parrington was using Trent’s Library of American Literature and Moore’s Shelburne Essays in one of his classes at Washington.

The “Puritan Divines” chapter was a long-delayed professional leap since his first (and last) national publication on domestic architecture in House Beautiful. He now had a context and a network to ease his further entrance into the scholarly community. And he had at last found a mode in which to channel the religious interests earlier manifested in the desire to preach and to write penitential poetry. Appearing in The Cambridge History of American

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