Van Wyck Brooks, The World of Washington Irving (E.P. Dutton, 1944, 387 pp.)

Van Wyck Brooks is an author whose work was enormously popular in the mid-20^th century. How popular? Walk into any used bookstore and you’ll trip over his books. Time magazine, whose cover he graced in 1944, called him “the nation’s most distinguished literary critic.”

He is most famous for five volumes known collectively as “Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915,” the most well-known of which is The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, published in 1936, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The other volumes are New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940); The World of Washington Irving (1944); The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947); and The Confident Years: 1885-1915 (1952).

Scott Berg’s Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978) recounts the harrowing years when Brooks was unable to write because of a mental breakdown, and how Perkins helped him climb back out of his psychic abyss to become one of the 20^th century’s most prolific, if now forgotten, authors. Brooks himself was the focus of Raymond Nelson’s Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer’s Life (1981), and his long friendship with critic Lewis Mumford was detailed in Robert E. Spiller’s edited volume of their letters, The Record of a Literary Friendship, 1921-1963 (1970).

I am thoroughly enjoying The World of Washington Irving, being a huge fan of Irving, but the book’s canvas stretches far beyond, covering a host of other writers from Edgar Allen Poe to James Fenimore Cooper, John James Audubon, William Gilmore Simms, and lesser luminaries whose stars have long since dimmed. There is a treasury of learning here, and it is a pleasure to read.

Van Wyck (rhymes with bike) Brooks was widely lauded during his own day with awards and honorary degrees, but as Patton so rightly noted, all glory is fleeting. When Brooks died in Bridgewater, Connecticut in 1963 at the age of 77, his town decided to build a library wing in his honor. The effort died after ten years of meager fundraising, only to be revived when a California hermit who admired Brooks’s writing left the library $300,000 in his will. The wing was finally dedicated in 1980.

Eighty years ago, with the Nazis rising in Europe and with the world tottering on the brink of madness, critic Malcolm Cowley reviewed The Flowering of New England. In addition to Brooks’s erudition and scholarship, Cowley lauded Brooks for “turning back to the great past in order to see the real nature of the traditions that we are trying to save, and in order to gain new strength for the struggles ahead.”

Gaining new strengths for the struggles ahead, be they against personal demons or the next global firestorm: still one of the best reasons I’ve ever heard for reading books like this, then or now.

Charles Dickens, by Jane Smiley. Penguin Lives Series (Penguin, 2002, pp. 212)

One of the great joys of my life that I look forward to with keen pleasure is continuing to read everything that Charles Dickens wrote. I was introduced to him about ten years ago, the way that anyone should properly be: through Great Expectations and then David Copperfield. I was hooked.

The two words that best describe Dickens are genius and energy. Anyone feeling that they’ve over-achieved in life will consider that Dickens wrote The Pickwick Papers when he was 25. Before he was 30 he had added Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge. How is that even possible?

He went on to write a total of 15 novels, among the best in the English language, 10 of which are more than 800 pages long. This is on top of his other novels, stories, plays, travel writing, essays, and letters. He edited magazines, gave dramatic performances, speeches, and readings all over the world, walked 10-20 miles a day, while being an insensitive husband and problematic father to ten children. He lived, wrote, and worked at an indefatigable pace before it all suddenly ended with his early death at age 58. A national treasure, he was buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey.

There are many gateways into Dickens’s fascinating life, and those who want to dive deep can plunge into Edgar Johnson’s 2-volume Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (1953) or Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens (1991), which clocks in at 1,195 pages. For those who prefer biographies that don’t double as doorstops, pick up this slim little volume in the Penguin Lives series.

Author Jane Smiley is no slouch herself, having won a Pulitzer Prize for her 1991 novel, A Thousand Acres. She clearly admires Dickens, and for her readers who are also aspiring writers, this book doubles as a graduate seminar on what novels are and what great novelists aim to achieve. She critically analyzes all of Dickens’s writings and stays close by his desk as he struggles to please his growing audience and feed his growing brood. Along the way, he found a powerful voice that combined, in Smiley’s words, artistic vision with social action and brought that vision to life in some of the most memorable literary characters ever created.

Smiley argues that his only peer among English writers is William Shakespeare, while Claire Tomalin in Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) wrote that only The Bard created more memorable characters than Dickens.

Do yourself a favor and find out if they are right. Make the acquaintance of the Pickwickians, the Artful Dodger, Samuel Weller, and all the rest. The remaining years of your life will thank you for it.