Malcolm Cowley (1898–1989) Literary historian, critic, editor, poet. Cowley interrupted his education at Harvard to serve with the American Field Service in the First World War and then struggled as a freelance writer in Greenwich Village before returning to Harvard and graduating in 1920. A year later he received an American Field Service fellowship, which enabled him to study in France for two years. There he became acquainted with young American writers, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, as well as with the leading proponents of Dada. He recounted his experiences in New York and Paris in Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934), which established his importance as a literary historian and critic. Cowley served as literary editor (1929–44) of the New Republic and contributed to the development of modern American literature by supporting new writers and critics. As a literary adviser at Viking Press (1948–85) he helped to revitalize interest in the previously undervalued fiction of William Faulkner. Cowley's own writing includes literary history and criticism, translations of French writers (including André Gide and Paul Valéry), and two volumes of poetry, Blue Juniata: Poems (1929) and The Dry Season (1941). W. E. B. Du Bois (William Edweard Burghardt Du Bois, 1868–1963) Civil-rights leader, author. Du Bois earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1895) and taught classics at Wilberforce University (1894–96), sociology at the University of Pennsylvania (1896–97), and economics and history at Atlanta University (1897–1910). An early exponent of full civil and political equality for African Americans, Du Bois was a cofounder of the Niagara Movement, out of which came the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. Du Bois was concerned for the welfare of blacks throughout the world and in 1919 organized the first of several Pan-African Congresses. He was editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis from 1910 until 1934, when he returned to Atlanta University, where he taught until 1944. In 1961, Du Bois became a member of the American Communist party and shortly thereafter renounced his American citizenship. He spent the last two years of his life in Ghana. His books include The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), The World and Africa: An Inquiry Into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1947), and In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (1952). T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888–1965) Poet, playwright, critic, editor. Eliot studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. His early poetry, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) and The Waste Land (1922), sounded the themes of isolation and despair and combined erudition with experimentation in technique. His criticism was characterized by a strong awareness of the Western tradition and, through its emphasis on the self-sufficiency of a work of art, influenced the development of New Criticism. From 1922 to 1939 Eliot edited his own literary review, the Criterion, and his editorials for the journal reflected his growing interest in religious ideas. He came to believe that literary criticism should include a moral component and that poetry is most socially useful in the form of theater. In 1927 Eliot was received into the Church of England, became a British citizen, and began to advocate the establishment of a Christian society as the alternative to what he saw as the barrenness of modern life. His work as a playwright ranged from the explicitly to the implicitly religious, and his later plays were designed for the popular stage. Eliot began a lifelong association with Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) when the publishing house began financially supporting the Criterion in 1925, and there he promoted important new literature. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970) Critic. Krutch studied literature and drama at Columbia University, earning an M.A. in 1916 and, after a brief tour of service with the Army Psychological Corps in the First World War, a Ph.D. in 1924. He joined the editorial staff of the Nation in 1924. He resigned in 1937 to become a professor of English at Columbia but remained a drama critic at the magazine until he retired from the university and moved to Arizona in 1952. A conservative social critic, Krutch saw technology and modern life as threats to man's humanity. He explored these concerns in The Modern Temper (1929), an important modernist document. After purchasing a home in Connecticut with his wife in 1932, he began to take solace in nature. After moving to Arizona, Krutch published a number of works on nature in the Southwest. He won the National Book Award (1954) for The Measure of Man, in which he revised the views he had espoused in The Modern Temper. Sinclair Lewis ([Harry] Sinclair Lewis, 1885–1951) Novelist. Lewis was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, and graduated from Yale in 1908. During his college years he traveled, and before achieving success as a novelist he supported himself through various editorial and journalistic jobs across the United States. Lewis reached the height of his career during the 1920s, producing five highly acclaimed novels—Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927), and Dodsworth (1929)—that targeted middle-class conformity and commercialism in America. All five were popular as well as critical successes. In 1926 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Arrowsmith but he declined it, citing his objection to the terms that the prize be awarded "for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of American manners and manhood." Lewis was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1930). His career declined thereafter, as his writing lost its satirical edge and his audience changed during the Great Depression. Three of his later novels, however, were well received: It Can't Happen Here (1935), Cass Timberlane (1945), and Kingsblood Royal (1947). Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) Journalist, political commentator. While a student at Harvard, Lippmann served as editor of the Harvard Monthly and embraced socialism, cofounding the Harvard Socialist Club. In 1914, after the publication of his book A Preface to Politics (1913), Lippmann and Herbert Croly founded the New Republic, where Lippmann became an associate editor. He had rejected socialism by then, and in 1916 he was a strong supporter of Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party. He worked with Newton Baker, Wilson's secretary of war, and helped draw up the Fourteen Points peace program as well as the covenant of the League of Nations. Lippmann left the New Republic in 1917, returned briefly in 1919, and then joined the New York World, where he became editor in 1929. After the World closed in 1931, he joined the staff of the Herald Tribune, where for decades he wrote a syndicated column, which was eventually acquired by the Washington Post. As a columnist, Lippmann roundly criticized the Korean War, McCarthyism, and the Vietnam War. Alain Locke (Alain LeRoy Locke, 1886–1954) Critic, philosopher. The son of schoolteachers, Locke studied at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Berlin. In 1907 he became the first African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship, and in 1918 he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard. As a professor of philosophy at Howard University, where he taught until 1953, he advocated the development of the institution as a center of African American cultural and intellectual life. Locke looked to talented African Americans to act as leaders in the effort to improve race relations and achieve equality in America, and he drew criticism for his perceived elitism and emphasis on the individual over the community. A leading force behind the Harlem Renaissance, he edited The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an anthology of outstanding African American writing. Locke worked with the organization Associates in Negro Folk Education, which between 1936 and 1942 published nine acclaimed "Bronze Booklets" on African American culture. He espoused the theory of cultural pluralism, which values the coexistence of different cultures within society, and throughout his career was concerned with the study of race relations. An active proponent of the adult-education movement, he served as the first African American president of the American Association for Adult Education (1946-47). Robert S. Lynd (1892–1970) and Helen Merrell Lynd (1896–1982) Social scientists. Robert and Helen Lynd, married in 1921, coauthored Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929), a seminal sociological study that was focused on Muncie, Indiana, and in which they explored the effects that the new consumer culture had on American life. Robert Lynd earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia for the work and for three decades (1931-61) taught as a professor in the department there. In his final book, Knowledge for What? (1939), he argued for the use of social science to improve society. Helen Lynd began teaching at the newly founded Sarah Lawrence College in 1929 and was instrumental in developing a curriculum that emphasized faculty-student interaction and that relied on personalized evaluations instead of grades. In 1944 she received a Ph.D. from Columbia in the history of ideas. Drawing on her experience at Sarah Lawrence, she published several books on education, including Field Work in Education (1945) and Toward Discovery (1965). In On Shame and the Search for Identity (1958) she examined the effects of society on identity. She championed academic freedom and supported educators under attack during the McCarthy era. She retired from Sarah Lawrence in 1964 but continued to teach part-time for the rest of her life. Margaret Mead (1901–78) Anthropologist, curator. At Barnard College, Mead studied with Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology, and with his graduate student Ruth Benedict, and she was influenced by their emphasis on culture, rather than biology, as a force shaping human behavior. After receiving an M.A. from Columbia in 1924, Mead completed a year of fieldwork in Samoa. On her return she became an assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, an association that lasted until her death. Her fieldwork became the basis for her best-selling book Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), and she received a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1929. In subsequent years Mead conducted extensive fieldwork in Oceania, studying the influence of culture on the formation of character and behavior. She advanced the methodology of anthropology, using photography and film as research tools, and advocated using anthropological methods and insights to further an understanding of American culture. From 1954 until her death Mead was on the faculty of the anthropology department at Columbia, and in the course of her career she taught at numerous universities, including Fordham, where she also served (1968–70) as chair of the division of social sciences. She remained in the public eye by writing popular works on social and moral issues; beginning in 1962 she wrote a column for Redbook magazine. Through her work as a curator and especially through her writings for a general audience and her public lectures delivered throughout the United States and Europe, Mead proved to be an enormously successful popularizer of anthropology. After her death she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. H. L. Mencken (Henry Louis Mencken, 1880–1956) Journalist, critic. A native of Baltimore, Mencken began his career as a newspaperman in 1899 and quickly ascended through the ranks of the Baltimore Herald before beginning, in 1906, a lifelong affiliation with the Baltimore Sun. Mencken's reviews, editorials, and columns for the Sun established his reputation as an iconoclast and a caustic wit. He also offered social commentary and promoted modern literature through two magazines, serving as coeditor (1914-23) of the Smart Set and cofounding (1924) the American Mercury, of which he was sole editor from 1925 to 1933. In his criticism Mencken primarily targeted the American middle class, business, and organized religion. He also derided politicians, and covered for the Sun every presidential convention from 1920 to 1940 as well as those of 1948. His popularity ebbed and flowed, however, as his unchanging invective and values (including a love of German culture) came into conflict with the sympathies and loyalties of Americans during the First and Second World Wars and the Great Depression. His more successful works include a three-volume autobiography and four editions of The American Language, a nonscholarly but respected examination of American English. In 1948, Mencken suffered a stroke, which left him unable to read or write and from which he never recovered.