Vernon Louis Parrington
| Vernon Louis Parrington | |
|---|---|
Parrington, c. 1909
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| Born |
August 3, 1871 Aurora, Illinois |
| Died | June 16, 1929 (aged 57) Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, England |
| Nationality | American |
| Subject | American politics; American studies |
| Spouse | Julia Rochester Williams (married 1901) |
Vernon Louis Parrington (August 3, 1871 – June 16, 1929) was an American literary historian and scholar. His three-volume history of American letters, Main Currents in American Thought, won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1928 and was one of the most influential books for American historians of its time.
Born in Aurora, Illinois, to a Republican family that soon moved to Emporia, Kansas, Parrington attended College of Emporia and Harvard College (BA 1893). He did not undertake graduate study. He was appalled by the hardships of Kansas farmers in the 1890s, and began moving left. After teaching English at College of Emporia he moved to the University of Oklahoma in 1897, where he taught British literature, organized the department of English, coached the football team, played on the baseball team, edited the campus newspaper, and tried to beautify the campus. He published little and in 1908 he was fired due to pressures from religious groups who wanted all "immoral faculty" fired. From there he went on to a distinguished academic career at the University of Washington.
Parrington moved to the much friendlier University of Washington in Seattle in 1908. He recalled in 1918, "With every passing year my radicalism draws fresh nourishment from large knowledge of the evils of private capitalism. Hatred of that selfish system is become the chief passion of my life. The change from Oklahoma to Washington marks the shift with me from the older cultural interpretation of life to the later economic."
Parrington founded the interdisciplinary American Studies movement with his 1927 work Main Currents in American Thought. The movement was expanded in the 1920s and 1930s by Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Robert Spiller. The elements that these pioneers considered revolutionary were interdisciplinarity, a holistic culture concept, and a focus on the uniqueness of American culture.
From the introduction to Main Currents of American Thought:
"I have undertaken to give some account of the genesis and development in American letters of certain germinal ideas that have come to be reckoned traditionally American—how they came into being here, how they were opposed, and what influence they have exerted in determining the form and scope of our characteristic ideals and institutions. In pursuing such a task, I have chosen to follow the broad path of our political, economic, and social development, rather than the narrower belletristic."
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