Bernard DeVoto
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Bernard Augustine DeVoto (January 11, 1897 - November 13, 1955) was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West. He was born in Ogden, Utah. He attended the University of Utah for one year, and then transferred to Harvard University, but interrupted his education to serve in World War I. After the war, he graduated in 1920.
He began his career in 1922 as an English instructor at Northwestern University and began to write articles and novels, which often provoked controversy for their liberal viewpoint. Sometimes he used the pseudonyms John August and Cady Hewes. In 1927, DeVoto resigned from Northwestern and moved to Massachusetts with his wife Avis. He began to devote himself to serious writing along with part-time instructing at Harvard. He wrote frequent articles for periodicals, with a regular column, "The Easy Chair," in Harper's Magazine from 1935 until his death.
DeVoto became an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Mark Twain's papers. From 1936 to 1938 he lived in New York City, where he was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and then returned to Massachusetts.
In DeVoto's later years, he gained fame for his popular histories of the West, starting with The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943). Across the Wide Missouri followed in 1948 (Pulitzer Prize, 1948), and The Course of Empire in 1952 (National Book Award, 1953); these were supplemented by DeVoto's popular abridged edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). From the 1940s he was renowned for his championing of public lands and of conservation of natural resources, and for his pugnacious defense of civil liberties.
His son, Mark DeVoto, is a prominent music theorist and professor at Tufts University.
[edit] Selected works of Bernard DeVoto
- Mark Twain's America (1932)
- Mark Twain in Eruption (1940)
- Mark Twain at Work (1942)
- The Year of Decision: 1846 (1942)
- The Portable Mark Twain (1946)
- Across the Wide Missouri (1947)
- The Course of Empire (1952)
- The Journals of Lewis and Clark, editor (1953)
- DeVoto's West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good (2002)
[edit] References
- Stegner, Wallace E., The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974)
- Stegner, Wallace E., editor, The Letters of Bernard DeVoto (1975)
