Unknown
Cleanth Brooks
Cleanth Brooks, Gray Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric
Cleanth Brooks was one of 20th-century America’s most influential literary critics and literature professors.
With Todd County’s Robert Penn Warren, his classmate and longtime colleague, Brooks wrote the classic college textbooks Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943). They promoted what became known as the New Criticism, which focused on a close reading and structural analysis of literature. Brooks and Warren, along with Charles W. Pipkin, founded and edited The Southern Review, a leading literary journal that became a model for others.
Brooks was born in Murray on Oct. 16, 1906, to the Rev. Cleanth Brooks Sr., a Methodist minister, and Bessie Lee Witherspoon Brooks. After receiving a classical education at McTyeire Institute in McKenzie, Tennessee, Brooks attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree, graduating summa cum laude in 1928.
Two significant literary movements began at Vanderbilt while Brooks was a student there: the Southern Agrarians and the Fugitive poets. Brooks made lifelong friendships with Warren and fellow writers John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle and Donald Davidson. Brooks did graduate work at Tulane University in New Orleans and as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University’s Exeter College.
Louisiana State University hired Brooks as an English professor in 1932, and he remained there until leaving for Yale University in 1947. Brooks was on the Yale faculty until his retirement in 1975 but took leave to serve as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Texas, and as cultural attaché at the U.S. Embassy in London, 1964-1966.
Brooks received two Guggenheim Fellowships and honorary degrees from many universities, including the University of Kentucky. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Philosophical Society. The National Endowment for the Humanities in 1985 chose Brooks to give the Jefferson Lecture, the United States government’s highest honor for achievements in the humanities.
His other critical works include Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939) and The Well Wrought Urn (1947). He wrote Understanding Drama (1948) with Robert Heilman and Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957) with William K. Wimsatt. He also wrote A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer’s Craft (1972); The Language of the American South (1985); Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth Century Poetry (1991); Community, Religion, and Literature (1995); and several books about William Faulkner’s work, including William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978), William Faulkner: First Encounters (1983) and Firm Beliefs of William Faulkner (1987).
Brooks was married to Edith Amy Blanchard from 1934 until her death in 1986. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 10, 1994.