Bernard DeVoto
| Bernard DeVoto | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Bernard Augustine DeVoto January 11, 1897 Ogden, Utah |
| Died | November 13, 1955 (aged 58) New York City |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Period | 1932–1955 |
| Genre | History |
| Subject | Western United States |
| Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for History (1948) National Book Award for Nonfiction (1953) |
| Spouse | Avis DeVoto |
| Children | Gordon DeVoto, Mark DeVoto |
Bernard Augustine DeVoto (January 11, 1897 – November 13, 1955) was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.
He was born in Ogden, Utah. He attended the University of Utah for one year, then transferred to Harvard University, entering as a member of the class of 1918. He interrupted his education to serve in the Army in World War I, then returned to school and graduated in 1920.
He began his career in 1922 as an English instructor at Northwestern University and began to write articles and novels, which often provoked controversy for their liberal viewpoint. Sometimes he used the pseudonyms "John August" and "Cady Hewes." In 1927, DeVoto resigned from Northwestern and moved to Massachusetts with his wife Avis. He began to dedicate himself to serious writing along with part-time instructing at Harvard University. (His ambition of attaining a permanent position at Harvard was never realized.) DeVoto wrote influential articles for periodicals, succeeding, for example, in promoting the Vilfredo Pareto vogue with a number of articles in Harper's Magazine in 1933. This led to a regular Harper's column, "The Easy Chair," which DeVoto wrote from 1935 until his death.
DeVoto became an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Twain's papers; this work culminated in several publications, including the best-selling Letters From the Earth, which appeared only in 1962. From 1936 to 1938 he worked in New York City, where he was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, after which he returned to Massachusetts.
In 1936, DeVoto published "Genius is Not Enough," a review of Thomas Wolfe's The Story of a Novel (1936), in which he wrote that Wolfe's work was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners." The effect of this essay on Wolfe's self-confidence was perhaps the greatest influence on his cutting ties with Scribners and editor Maxwell Perkins shortly before his death in 1938.
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