"Emerson then incarnated the moral optimism, the progress, and the energy of the American spirit." -- Howard Mumford Jones
Howard Mumford Jones (April 16, 1892 - May 11, 1980) was a U.S. writer, literary critic, and professor of English at Harvard University.
Jones was the book editor for The Boston Evening Transcript.
Before going to Harvard, Jones was a member of the English faculty at he University of North Carolina. In 1925, while there, he approached the president of the university, Harry Woodburn Chase, lamenting the absence of a bookstore in the town of Chapel Hill, and offered to open one in his office. (The bookstore is still in existence.)***
In February, 1954 Mr. Jones gave the dedicatory address at the opening of the addition to the University of Wisconsin Library, entitled: "Books and the Independent Mind." The Crux of his comments was perhaps contained in his midpoint comment: "While it is true that we in this nation remain free to be idiotic, it does not necessarily follow, that we must be idiotic, in order to be free!" In 1965 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for American Culture-The Formative Years. He also authored Belief and Disbelief in American Literature (1967) and The Age of Energy (1971), and many scholarly journal articles.
The Howard Mumford Jones Professorship of American Studies in the Department of History, Harvard University, was named in his honor.
"Emerson was the chief figure in the American transcendental movement, a fact that complicates all accounts of him in literary or cultural history.""I, for one, hope that youth will again revolt and again demoralize the dead weight of conformity that now lies upon us.""Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it.""When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration."