Mark Van Doren
Based on Wikipedia: Mark Van Doren
The Teacher Who Made Literature Feel Like a Conversation
In 1943, a young Columbia University student named Jack Kerouac faced a decision that would shape American literature. He had just earned an A in Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare course, and something about the experience made him quit the football team to pursue writing instead. Van Doren had that effect on people.
Over the course of nearly forty years in a single classroom at Columbia, Van Doren mentored an astonishing roster of writers and thinkers: Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose spiritual writings influenced millions. Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who would become central figures of the Beat Generation. John Berryman, one of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Whittaker Chambers, whose testimony would shake the American political establishment. Lionel Trilling, who became Van Doren's colleague and one of the most important literary critics of his era. The list goes on and on, crossing disciplines and decades.
What was it about this man that could shape such different minds?
The Boy from the Illinois Prairie
Mark Van Doren was born on June 13, 1894, in Hope, Illinois—a small town whose name suited the optimistic spirit he would carry throughout his life. He was the fourth of five brothers, all sons of the county doctor, Charles Lucius Van Doren. The family traced their ancestry to Dutch immigrants, though by this point the connection was remote.
The Van Dorens lived on a farm in eastern Illinois, surrounded by the flat, fertile land that would later appear in Van Doren's poetry. But the doctor wanted better educational opportunities for his sons, so he moved the family to nearby Urbana—close enough to keep the rural roots, but within reach of good schools and, eventually, the University of Illinois.
All five brothers attended local schools before moving on to higher education. Mark's older brother Carl Van Doren became an academic and biographer in his own right, eventually winning the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for his book on Benjamin Franklin. Just one year later, Mark would win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Van Doren household had produced two Pulitzer winners in consecutive years—a remarkable achievement for any family, let alone one from a small Illinois farm town.
A Legendary Classroom Presence
Van Doren earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois in 1914, then headed east to Columbia University for graduate work. He completed his doctorate in 1920 and immediately joined the faculty, where his brother Carl was already teaching. Columbia would be his intellectual home for the rest of his career.
What made Van Doren's teaching so effective was his fundamental belief that great literature belonged to everyone. He taught Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante not as dusty monuments requiring special credentials to appreciate, but as living works that any attentive, thoughtful person could engage with directly. As one observer noted, his teaching was grounded in the proposition that an intelligent person of good faith needed no special qualifications to read Othello, The Iliad, or The Divine Comedy. You just needed to pay attention and use your intelligence.
This approach might sound obvious today, but in the early twentieth century, when literary criticism was becoming increasingly specialized and academic, Van Doren's accessibility was refreshing. He treated his students with respect, without condescension, and this brought out the best in them.
Van Doren became a full professor in 1942 and continued teaching until 1959, when he became Professor Emeritus—a title he held until his death in 1972. Columbia eventually named its highest teaching award after him, while its major scholarship award bears Lionel Trilling's name. The two men represented different styles—Trilling struck some as patrician in demeanor, while Van Doren seemed ever the populist—but together they inspired what one writer called "a rare filial devotion" in generations of students.
The 1920s: A Decade of Building
The 1920s were transformative years for Van Doren. At Columbia, his remarkable students included Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, both just beginning the careers that would make them famous. Van Doren published scholarly books on the English poet John Dryden and the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. He served as literary editor of The Nation, one of the country's most influential magazines.
It was at The Nation that he met Dorothy Graffe, also a writer, who would become his wife in 1922. Dorothy later wrote a memoir called The Professor and I, documenting their life together.
Van Doren also edited an anthology of world poetry that proved surprisingly popular. The royalties enabled the couple to buy a house on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in February 1929—just months before the stock market crash that ended the Roaring Twenties. Their timing, at least for real estate, had been impeccable.
Breaking Barriers
At a time when Ivy League institutions routinely discriminated against Jewish students, Van Doren earned a reputation for what contemporaries called philo-Semitism—a genuine appreciation for Jewish students and culture. In 1927, he published an essay in the Menorah Journal (a publication that would later be rechristened Commentary) titled "Jewish Students I Have Known."
The essay was perceptive and, as it turned out, somewhat prophetic about the talented young men he was teaching. He wrote that Meyer Schapiro, who would become one of the twentieth century's most important art historians, already displayed "the passion to know and make known." The poet Louis Zukofsky was "a subtle poet" with "an inarticulate soul." Clifton Fadiman impressed with his tremendous fund of knowledge.
About Lionel Trilling, Van Doren was particularly insightful. The young Trilling possessed "dignity and grace," Van Doren wrote, and whatever he chose to do "will be lovely, for it will be the fruit of a pure intelligence slowly ripened in not too fierce a sun." Trilling would indeed join him on the Columbia faculty and become one of the defining literary critics of the American twentieth century.
From Beats to Monks
The range of Van Doren's influence defies easy categorization. His students ranged, as one chronicler put it, "from ecstatic Zen Beat masters (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac) to verse sophisticates (Louis Simpson, John Hollander, Richard Howard)."
The encounter with Kerouac was decisive. After getting that A in Van Doren's Shakespeare course, Kerouac abandoned athletics for literature—a choice that would eventually produce On the Road and help define a generation's restlessness.
Ginsberg's story with Van Doren took a more dramatic turn. In June 1949, Ginsberg was arrested as an accessory to crimes committed by Herbert Huncke and others—a group of petty criminals and drug users Ginsberg had been associating with. Van Doren testified on his behalf and helped him avoid jail time. For a distinguished professor to stand up for a student caught in such circumstances showed both loyalty and a willingness to see potential where others might have seen only trouble.
Then there was Thomas Merton, who would become one of the twentieth century's most influential spiritual writers. Van Doren influenced both Merton's conversion to Catholicism and his poetry. The trajectory from a Columbia literature classroom to a Trappist monastery in Kentucky might seem unexpected, but Van Doren's teaching touched something deep enough to set such journeys in motion.
Other notable students included the psychologist Walter B. Pitkin Jr., the Japanologist Donald Keene (who would spend his career interpreting Japanese literature for Western audiences), the novelist Anthony Robinson, and even the chemist Roald Hoffmann, who later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Van Doren's influence crossed not just literary styles but entire fields of endeavor.
The Writer Behind the Teacher
While teaching occupied the center of his professional life, Van Doren was a prolific writer in his own right. His 1940 Pulitzer Prize came for Collected Poems 1922–1938, but this was just one collection among many. He published poetry throughout his life, from Spring Thunder in 1924 to Good Morning: Last Poems, which appeared posthumously in 1973.
His critical works included studies of John Dryden, Shakespeare, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His book Shakespeare, published in 1939, proved so useful that the novelist John Updike later wrote: "Van Doren's Shakespeare got me through Harry Levin's course back in 1951. Whenever I reread a Shakespeare play, I reread what Van Doren said about it."
Van Doren also wrote novels—The Transients, Windless Cabins, and Tilda—though these never achieved the recognition of his poetry and criticism. He contributed short fiction to various publications, including The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which published his story "The Witch of Ramoth" in April 1958.
His nonfiction ranged widely. The Liberal Education, published in 1943, helped promote what became known as the "great books" movement—the idea that education should center on reading and discussing the classic works of Western civilization. This philosophy aligned perfectly with his classroom approach: the great books weren't museum pieces but living conversations anyone could join.
Beyond the Classroom
Van Doren's intellectual life extended well beyond Columbia's walls. He served two stints at The Nation, first as literary editor from 1924 to 1928, then as film critic from 1935 to 1938. Starting in 1941, he appeared on Invitation to Learning, a CBS Radio program where experts discussed great literature.
From 1953 to 1971, he appeared weekly on NBC radio's summer program "Eternal Light: The Words We Live By," discussing the literary and cultural impact of the Bible with Maurice Samuel. Radio gave Van Doren a way to bring his accessible approach to literature to audiences far beyond those who could attend his classes.
He became a Fellow in American Letters of the Library of Congress and served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a member of the Society for the Prevention of World War III—a reminder that the mid-twentieth century's intellectuals often engaged directly with the political anxieties of their time.
In one of his more unusual involvements, Van Doren was among the signatories of an agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. The resulting World Constituent Assembly actually met and adopted what it called the Constitution for the Federation of Earth—though this remained more an idealistic gesture than a practical political achievement.
Family and the Shadow of Scandal
Mark and Dorothy Van Doren had two sons: Charles and John. John lived quietly in Cornwall, Connecticut, at the family farmstead where his father had done most of his writing during breaks between academic years.
Charles Van Doren's story took a more complicated turn. In the late 1950s, he achieved national fame as a contestant on Twenty-One, a popular television quiz show. He was handsome, articulate, and seemingly possessed of an impossibly broad range of knowledge. America loved him.
Then the scandal broke. Twenty-One, it emerged, was rigged. Contestants received answers in advance; the dramatic tension audiences experienced was entirely manufactured. Charles Van Doren eventually admitted his participation in the deception, and his career never fully recovered.
The 1994 film Quiz Show dramatized these events, with Paul Scofield portraying Mark Van Doren. Scofield earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance, which captured the painful position of a father watching his son's integrity collapse on a national stage. The film presented Mark Van Doren as a man of genuine principle, bewildered and wounded by his son's choices.
Charles Van Doren largely retreated from public life afterward, though he lived until 2019, eventually reaching his nineties.
Final Years and Legacy
Mark Van Doren died on December 10, 1972, in Torrington, Connecticut. He was seventy-eight years old and had undergone surgery for circulatory problems at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital just two days earlier. He was buried at Cornwall Hollow Cemetery in Connecticut, near the farmstead where he had spent so many productive summers.
His correspondence with the poet Allen Tate is preserved at Vanderbilt University. His papers, spanning 1910 to 1976, reside at Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The legacy lives on in institutional form. Since 1962, students of Columbia College have given the Mark Van Doren Award each year to honor a great teacher—fitting recognition for a man whose teaching defined what the profession could be. The English Department at California Lutheran University awards the Mark Van Doren Prize for Poetry annually, an endowed scholarship funded by donations from his sons John and Charles.
But perhaps the truest measure of Van Doren's influence lies in the extraordinary diversity of minds he shaped. A future Nobel laureate in chemistry. The monk who wrote The Seven Storey Mountain. The poets who defined both academic formalism and Beat spontaneity. The critics who explained literature to generations of readers. The Cold War figure whose testimony changed American political history.
All of them sat in Mark Van Doren's classroom at some point, and something in his approach—the respect for intelligence, the faith that great works speak to anyone who listens, the sense that literature matters—changed what they thought possible.
The Art of Teaching
Van Doren once said that "the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery." This wasn't false modesty. He genuinely believed that the teacher's role was not to impose interpretations but to create conditions where students could find meaning for themselves.
This philosophy explains why his students went in such wildly different directions. He wasn't producing disciples who would repeat his views. He was helping people discover their own voices. A student who found his voice through Van Doren might become a Beat poet rejecting conventional society, or a Trappist monk withdrawing from it entirely, or an academic critic explaining it to others. The direction didn't matter. What mattered was that each had learned to engage with literature—and through literature, with life—on their own terms.
In an age when education increasingly emphasizes measurable outcomes and vocational preparation, Van Doren represents something older and perhaps more valuable: the belief that reading great works carefully, discussing them honestly, and thinking about them seriously is itself a form of education worth having. Not because it leads to a particular career, but because it makes for a richer inner life.
That A in Shakespeare class changed Jack Kerouac's life. How many teachers can say the same?