Howard Mumford Jones


Howard Mumford Jones was an American intellectual historian, literary critic, journalist, poet, and professor of English at the University of Michigan and later at Harvard University.
Jones was the book editor for The Boston Evening Transcript.

Life

Jones was born in Saginaw, Michigan, and attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an undergraduate, winning oratorical contests there Before moving to Harvard University, Jones was a member of the English faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 1925 he approached president Harry Woodburn Chase, lamenting the absence of a bookstore in the town of Chapel Hill, and offered to open one in his office. This eventually became the Bull's Head Bookshop, now located in Student Stores.
In February 1954 Mr. Jones gave the dedicatory address at the opening of an addition to the University of Wisconsin's Memorial Library, entitled "Books and the Independent Mind." The crux of his comments was contained in this 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 Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years. He also authored Belief and Disbelief in American Literature, The Age of Energy, and many scholarly journal articles.
The Howard Mumford Jones Professorship of American Studies at Harvard University is named in his honor.
Among Jones's students at Harvard were cultural historian David Brion Davis and Betty Miller Unterberger, later the first woman professor at Texas A&M University and also the first woman president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Jones introduced Unterberger to the technical advantages of using a dictaphone while writing history.

Notable quotations

"Ours is the age which is proud of machines that think and suspicious of men who try to."

Works