Carl Clinton Van Doren Quotes

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

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Race, Credulity

• The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Anthologies, Writer

• Yes, it’s hard to write. But it’s harder not to.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Write, Writing

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Honest, Novel

• The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper’s Prairie had few followers.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Popular, Region

• Melville brought to the task a sound knowledge of actual whaling, much curious learning in the literature of the subject, and, above all, an imagination which worked with great power upon the facts of his own experience.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Experience, Knowledge

  Tags in Literature, Imagination

• 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.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Power

  Tags in American

• 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.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Death

  Tags in Generation, Conquest

• Guy Rivers, a conventional piece as regards the love affair which makes a part of the plot, is a tale of deadly strife between the laws of Georgia and a fiendish bandit.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Love

  Tags in Conventional

• Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Historical

• 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.

  Carl Clinton Van Doren

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Adventure, Literature

Carl Clinton Van Doren (11)

Birth:	10th September, 1885
Death:	18th July, 1950
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic

About

Carl Clinton Van Doren was a U.S. critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. He was the brother of Mark Van Doren and the uncle of Charles Van Doren. He won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Benjamin Franklin.

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• 1716 - Thomas Gray
• 1914 - Richard Widmark
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Deaths

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• 1931 - Melvil Dewey
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• 2005 - Kerry Packer