Mark Van Doren

Who was Mark Van Doren?

Mark Van Doren was an American poet, writer and a critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He remained literary editor of The Nation, in New York City, and its film critic, 1935 to 1938.

He won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems 1922–1938. Amongst his other notable works, many published in The Kenyon Review, include a collaboration with brother Carl Van Doren, American and British Literature since 1890; critical studies, The Poetry of John Dryden, Shakespeare, The Noble Voice and Nathaniel Hawthorne; collections of poems including Jonathan Gentry; stories; and the verse play The Last Days of Lincoln.