"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
Carl Clinton Van Doren (September 10, 1885—July 18, 1950) 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.
"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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""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.""Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to."
Born in Hope, Vermilion County, Illinois, Van Doren was the son of a country doctor and was raised on the family farm. He earned a bachelor of arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1907 and a doctorate from Columbia University in 1911 and continued to teach there until 1930. He was a world federalist and once said, "It is obvious that no difficulty in the way of world government can match the danger of a world without it".
Van Doren's study The American Novel, published in 1921, is generally credited with helping to re-establish Herman Melville's critical status as first-rate literary master.
From 1912 to 1935, Van Doren was married to Irita Bradford, editor of the New York Herald Tribune book review. He married Jean Wright Gorman in 1939, but divorced in 1945.
Van Doren died in Torrington, Connecticut.
A residence hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is named after Carl Clinton Van Doren.