Van Wyck Brooks - Literarian
The Chronicler of America's Literary Heritage - Origins
Van Wyck Brooks brought American literature to the notice of the world, thereby ensuring that writers such as Melville and Whitman were not forgotten. This is his story.
Today we read writers like Fennimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane, Bret Harte and Theodore Dreiser as if they've always been there, and if we haven't read them we have at least heard of them. The point is they would not have been here to read without the work of one man, one American, Van Wyck Brooks.
Origins - Plainfield, New Jersey
Van Wyck Brooks was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on February 16th 1886, which, in that year, was no longer the small backwater it had been, but a thriving, bustling New York commuter dormitory, which didn't suit people like Van Wyck's mother Sallie Brooks, who thought it unnecessary and rather common.
Sallie Brooks
As James Hoopes reminds us in his 1977 biography, Van Wyck Brooks - In Search of American Culture...
" Sallie Brooks never questioned her own qualifications as an arbiter of American taste and culture, and it would have been surprising if she had done so, with her secure upper-class childhood and ancestry that was, as she understood the word, impeccably American. Consciously proud of her Dutch and English forebears, she was quick to join the Daughters of the American Revolution when the organization was founded in the 1890s."
Ancestors
The first of Sallie Brooks' ancestors to settle in America, some seven generations before the birth of Van Wyck, was Cornelius Barente Van Wyck, who settled in New Amsterdam in 1659, with his descendants becoming prosperous Long Island farming gentry, with two of his great-grandsons fighting as generals with the American Army during the Revolutionary Wars. One of the general's sisters, Altje Van Brooks, married a colonel, John Bailey, who was of English descent. One of their sons, Theodorus, became a senator, with another, William, becoming - by marrying into the Platt family - a wealthy land owner. His son, Theodore, became an admiral in the American Navy, and was second-in-command at New Orleans when the Union took that city's surrender in the Civil War. John Bailey, the brother of the landowner, was Sallie's grandfather who " married a poet, Emily Thurber, who bore him three sons (two of whom perished in the Civil War) and in 1832 a daughter, Phebe, who became Sallie's mother."
Phebe was raised in Plattsburgh (named after the land owning family) and educated in a Manhattan boarding school, where one of her best friends was a relative of James Fennimore Cooper, whose family she got to know well. Phebe married Charles Ames in the 1850s, giving birth to Sallie, her only child, in 1858.
Sallie's experience of men was limited, but in February 1880 she fell in love with Charles Brooks.
Charles Brooks
Charles Brooks' family were cotton brokers in New York, a business his father, Mitchell, ran successfully until the Civil War, when it went bankrupt. Mitchell quickly picked himself up and enjoyed a second career as the manager of a New York department store, before dying of pneumonia at the age of forty-four.
Soon after his father's death Charles broke off relations with his three brothers over a bitter argument about the inheritance of their father's money. Charles then bought himself a partnership with a brokerage firm in New York, spending ten years in Europe looking after the firm's affairs there.
On his return to the US he went into business for himself, cutting quite a dash with his polished European ways, Sallie couldn't resist him. They were married in June 1882. Their first son, Charles Ames Brooks, was born in April 1883, and Van Wyck Brooks three years later.
Sadly Charles had no real acumen as a businessman, and soon after Van Wyck's birth his company went bust.
Sources:
James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1977
Van Wyck Brooks, From The Shadow of the Mountain: My Post-Meridian Years, J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd, London, 1961
