Mark Van Doren

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Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic. He was born in the town of Hope in Vermilion County, Illinois. The son of a country doctor, he was raised on his family's farm in eastern Illinois. He was the younger brother of the academic Carl Van Doren. Mark Van Doren earned a B.A. from the University of Illinois in 1914 and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1920.

Van Doren then taught at Columbia from 1920 to 1959 and twice served on the staff of The Nation. His students at Columbia included poet Allen Ginsberg and Thomas Merton, the writer, activist, and Trappist monk. Van Doren helped Ginsberg avoid jail time in June 1949 by testifying on his behalf when Ginsberg was arrested as an accessory to crimes carried out by Herbert Huncke and others.

Mark Van Doren married the novelist Dorothy Graffe Van Doren in 1922. Their son, Charles Van Doren (born February 12, 1926), briefly achieved renown as the winner of the rigged game show, Twenty-One.

Mark Van Doren died in Torrington, Connecticut, aged 76.

Publications

Poetry:

Spring Thunder (1924)
Jonathan Gentry (1931)
Winter Diary (1935)
Collected Poems 1922-1938 (1939), Winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The Mayfield Deer (1941)
The Last Days of Lincoln (1959)

Novels:

The Transients (1935)
Windless Cabins (1940)
Tilda (1943)

Nonfiction:

The Poetry of John Dryden (1920)
American and British Literature Since 1890 (1939), with Carl Van Doren
Shakespeare (1939)
The Liberal Education (1943)
The Noble Voice (1946)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949)
Introduction to Poetry (1951)
The Happy Critic (1961)

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