Bernard 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.

Life and work

He was born in Ogden, Utah. He attended the University of Utah for one year, and then transferred to Harvard University, but interrupted his education to serve in World War I. After the war, he 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. He wrote frequent articles for periodicals, with a regular column, "The Easy Chair," in Harper's Magazine from 1935 until his death.

DeVoto became an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Mark Twain's papers. From 1936 to 1938 he lived in New York City, where he was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and then returned to Massachusetts.

In 1936 DeVoto published "Genius is Not Enough," a scathing essay on Thomas Wolfe's "Look Homeward, Angel", in which he vehemently concluded that Wolfe’s work was “hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners" (Donald, D.H. "Look Homeward" 1987, 376-377). 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.

In DeVoto's later years, he gained fame for his popular histories of the West: "The Year of Decision: 1846" (1943), "Across the Wide Missouri" in 1947 (Pulitzer Prize, 1948), "The Course of Empire" in 1952 (National Book Award, 1953), and DeVoto's popular abridged edition of "The Journals of Lewis and Clark" (1953). From the 1940s he was renowned for his championing of public lands and of conservation of natural resources, and for his pugnacious defense of civil liberties.

His son, Mark DeVoto, is a prominent music theorist, composer, and retired professor at Tufts University.

Selected works of Bernard DeVoto

* "Mark Twain's America" (1932)
* "Mark Twain in Eruption" (1940)
* "Mark Twain at Work" (1942)
* Historical Trilogy::"The Year of Decision: 1846" (1942):"Across the Wide Missouri" (1947):"The Course of Empire" (1952)
* "The Portable Mark Twain" (1946)
* "The Journals of Lewis and Clark", editor (1953)
* "DeVoto's West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good " (2002)

References

* Stegner, Wallace E., "The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto" (1974)
* Stegner, Wallace E., editor, "The Letters of Bernard DeVoto" (1975)
* Topping, Gary. "Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History." 2003, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. ISBN 0-8061-3561-1

External links

* [http://www.media.utah.edu/UHE/d/DEVOTO,BERNARD.html Utah History: Bernard DeVoto]
* [http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=407 "FBI was out to get freethinking DeVoto", from High Country News]
* [http://home.comcast.net/~mdevoto]