Carl Clinton Van Doren Quotes

Carl Clinton Van Doren — American Critic born on September 10, 1885, died on July 18, 1950

Carl Clinton Van Doren was a U.S. critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. He was the brother of critic and teacher Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren... (wikipedia)

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom's Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

Although by 1851 tales of adventure had begun to seem antiquated, they had rendered a large service to the course of literature: they had removed the stigma, for the most part, from the word novel.

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

Carl Clinton Van Doren Quotes

Login with