Mark Van Doren
| Mark Van Doren | |
|---|---|
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|
| Born |
June 13, 1894 Hope, Vermilion County, Illinois |
| Died | December 10, 1972 (aged 78) Torrington, Connecticut |
| Occupation | poet, critic, teacher |
| Alma mater |
University of Illinois Columbia University |
| Notable works |
Shakespeare (1939) A Liberal Education (1943) |
| Notable awards |
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1940 for Collected Poems 1922–1938 Academy of American Poets' Fellowship (1967) |
| Spouse | Dorothy Graffe Van Doren |
| Children |
Charles Van Doren John Van Doren |
| Relatives | Carl Van Doren (brother) |
Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He was literary editor of The Nation, in New York City (1924–28), and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.
He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems 1922–1938. Amongst his other notable works, many published in The Kenyon Review, include a collaboration with brother Carl Van Doren, American and British Literature since 1890 (1939); critical studies, The Poetry of John Dryden (1920), Shakespeare (1939), The Noble Voice (1945) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949); collections of poems including Jonathan Gentry (1931); stories; and the verse play The Last Days of Lincoln (1959).
Van Doren was born in Vermilion County, Illinois, the fourth of five sons of the county's doctor, Charles Lucius Van Doren, of remote Dutch ancestry, and wife Eudora Ann Butz. He was raised on his family's farm in eastern Illinois, before his father decided to move to the neighboring town of Urbana, to be closer to good schools.
He was the younger brother of the academic and biographer Carl Van Doren, starting with whom all five brothers attended the local elementary school and high school. Mark Van Doren eventually studied at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where he earned a B.A. in 1914. In 1920, he earned a Ph.D. from what became the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, while also a member of the Boar's Head Society, a student society at the university devoted to poetry.
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