Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks, Jr. was an influential American literary critic and scholar born on October 16, 1906, in Murray, Kentucky. He grew up in a ministerial family, which shaped his educational journey and character development. After attending several schools, he graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1928, originally aiming to pursue a law career but ultimately shifting his focus to literature and poetry. He furthered his studies at Tulane University and Oxford University, earning multiple degrees and laying the groundwork for his academic career.
Brooks began teaching at Louisiana State University in 1931 and later became well-known for his role in the New Criticism movement, which emphasized close readings of texts rather than their social or political contexts. His seminal work, "The Well Wrought Urn," published in 1947, is regarded as a cornerstone of modern literary criticism. In 1947, he joined Yale University, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1975 and wrote about authors like William Faulkner. Brooks also served as a cultural attaché at the U.S. embassy in London from 1964 to 1966. He remained an active figure in academia until his passing on May 10, 1994, leaving behind a significant legacy in literary studies.
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Cleanth Brooks
- Born: October 16, 1906
- Birthplace: Murray, Kentucky
- Died: May 10, 1994
- Place of death: New Haven, Connecticut
Biography
Cleanth Brooks, Jr., was born in Murray, Kentucky, on October 16, 1906, to Cleanth and Bessie Lee Brooks. Cleanth Brooks, Sr., a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, was himself the son of a clergyman, George Brooks, who immigrated to the United States from Lincolnshire, England, in 1837. The pastoral assignments given to Cleanth Brooks, Sr., beginning in 1897, took the family to various towns in western Tennessee and ultimately to Memphis, where he worked for the church in educational affairs.
Despite moving from school to school as a youngster, Brooks was a good student, and by his early teens was encouraged by his father to set his sights on high academic achievement. In the fall of 1920, Brooks enrolled in a small preparatory school, the McTyeire School in McKenzie, Tennessee, that provided rigorous instruction and emphasized the development of character. In 1924, Brooks entered Vanderbilt University, a foremost Southern university located in Nashville, Tennessee. There his intention to become a lawyer was overtaken by his love of literature and a new realization that literature, particularly poetry, was a vital intellectual and emotional enterprise. Receiving his B.A. in 1928, Brooks then went to Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, for graduate study, and on earning his M.A. in 1929 was nominated for a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. His work at Oxford earned Brooks two degrees, a B.A in 1931, and a bachelor’s degree in literature in 1932.
Brooks’s first teaching position, as lecturer, began that year at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. Among his colleagues was the novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren, with whom he shared editorial work for the literary quarterly,Southern Review. Beginning in the mid- 1930’s, Warren and Brooks collaborated on several textbooks which were influential in American colleges in the following decades. In 1934, having achieved a measure of financial security in his early professional life, Brooks married Edith Amy Blanchard, whom he had met at Tulane University in 1928.
The work which helped established Brooks’s academic reputation in the 1940’s can be characterized by the labels “New Criticism” and “close reading.” Though neither term designates a fixed critical methodology, both involve critical attention to the meaning and internal structure of literary works in relative independence of social and political contexts. Brooks’s study The Well Wrought Urn, published in 1947, is recognized as a landmark of modern literary criticism.
In 1947, Brooks became a faculty member at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he taught until his retirement in 1975. During the latter part of his career he wrote extensively about the novels of William Faulkner, whose Southern milieu Brooks knew well from his own experience. In this work, which occupied Brooks for many years, he acknowledged a responsibility to a wider community of readers as well as to an academic audience, an inclination that was recognized by his appointment as cultural attaché at the United States embassy in London, England, from 1964 to 1966. Brooks’s wife of more than fifty years died in 1986, and he died of cancer in New Haven on May 10, 1994, having remained active in his profession into his last years.