Bernard DeVoto


Bernard Augustine DeVoto, American historian, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer, was a lifelong champion of American Public lands and the conservation of public resources as well as an outspoken defender of civil liberties. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described Devoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous,... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes infuriating, and never, never dull."

Background

He was born on January 11, 1897, in Ogden, Utah. He attended the University of Utah for one year, then transferred to Harvard University, entering as a member of the class of 1918. He interrupted his education to serve in the Army in World War I, then returned to school and graduated in 1920.

Career

DeVoto began his career in 1922 as an English instructor at Northwestern University. He also began publishing articles and novels. In 1927 he resigned from Northwestern. He and his wife Avis moved to Massachusetts in order to attempt to earn his living from writing along with part-time instructing at Harvard University. A series of articles he published in Harper's Magazine is credited with bringing the influential work of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto to wide audiences. This led to a regular Harper's column, "The Easy Chair," which DeVoto wrote from 1935 until his death.
DeVoto was also an authority on Mark Twain and served as a curator and editor for Twain's papers; this work culminated in several publications, including the best-selling Letters From the Earth, which appeared only in 1962. From 1936 to 1938 he worked in New York City, where he was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, after which he returned to Massachusetts.
It was during his tenure as editor of the Saturday Review that DeVoto produced one of his most controversial pieces, "Genius is Not Enough," a scathing review of Thomas Wolfe's The Story of a Novel, in which the novelist recounted his method of writing his autobiographical Of Time and the River, as essentially submitting undigested first drafts to be transformed into finished work by others. According to DeVoto, Wolfe's writing was "hacked and shaped and compressed into something resembling a novel by Mr. Perkins and the assembly-line at Scribners." Although in passing acknowledging Wolfe's genius, DeVoto excoriated his lack of artistry, "Mr. Wolfe... has written some of the finest fiction in our day. But a great part of what he writes is not fiction at all: it is only material with which he has struggled but which has defeated him." "Until Mr. Wolfe develops more craftsmanship, he will not be the important novelist he is now widely accepted as being." DeVoto's essay was a decisive factor in Wolfe's subsequent cutting ties with Scribners and editor Maxwell Perkins shortly before his death in 1938 and had a devastating effect on Wolfe's posthumous literary reputation.
The decade between 1943 and 53 saw the completion of what John L. Thomas called Devoto's "magnificent trilogy of the discovery, settling, and exploitation of the West": The Year of Decision: 1846 ; Across the Wide Missouri ; The Course of Empire. Across the Wide Missouri was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for History and The Course of Empire received National Book Award for Nonfiction. He also edited a selection of The Journals of Lewis and Clark. A book on the history, geography, and ecology of the American West remained unfinished at his death in 1955; in 2001, an edited version was published as Western Paradox.

Accusations of Communism

As early as 1938, when the Dies Committee was investigating radical professors and a Soviet takeover of America, DeVoto "mocked the conspiracy nuts" and yet was called "fascist" by the Left. In the 1950s, he felt "a Communist or two on any faculty constituted a far smaller danger than the procedures that would be necessary to keep them off." He also opposed the outlawing of the Communist Party USA.
"Historian Bernard DeVoto spoke for many liberals"
in disdaining "the prominence ex-communists had gained in public life during the Cold War."
He argued that despite the new-found patriotism of conservative ex-Communists, their commitments to absolutism and authoritarianism remained the same and continued to threaten freedom.
In April 1953, DeVoto's "Easy Chair" column criticized "The Case of the Censorious Congressman" during SISS and HUAC hearings of teachers. US Representative Carroll D. Kearns called DeVoto "pro-Communist."

Personal life and death

DeVoto married Avis DeVoto, a book reviewer, editor, and avid cook. She became friends with Julia Child. Child had written a fan letter to Bernard DeVoto regarding an article of his in Harper's Magazine; he had said that he detested stainless steel knives, which she thought "100% right". Avis' response began a long correspondence and friendship between the two women during Child's work on her groundbreaking Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child acknowledged Avis as "wet nurse" and "mentor" to the undertaking. The DeVotos' son Mark is a music theorist, composer, and retired professor at Tufts University. Their older son, Gordon, a writer, died in 2009.
DeVoto died on November 13, 1955.

Works