Edward Wagenknecht

Edward (Charles) Wagenknecht (March 28, 1900 – May 24, 2004) was an American

Wagenknecht was born in Chicago to Henry E. and Mary F. (Erichson) Wagenknecht, and grew up and went to school in Oak Park, Illinois. He was attracted from an early age to various art forms: theater, opera, movies, and the Oz novels of L. Frank Baum. He was particularly interested in the writings of critic Gamaliel Bradford, who immersed himself in the life and works of an author and then wrote what he called a "psychography" about the writer.

Wagenknecht received his

Wagenknecht spent a long career teaching at a number of schools: University of Chicago (1923–25), University of Washington (1925–1943), Illinois Institute of Technology (1943–1947), Boston University (1947–1965), and the extension division of Harvard University (1965–1972). His style of teaching was rigorous and traditional, and he challenged his students with tough examinations.

Throughout his teaching career and beyond, Wagenknecht wrote on his great loves of literature and film. Perhaps his best known books are Cavalcade of the English Novel (1943, second edition 1954) and Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952). A thinker of broad range, Wagenknecht wrote or edited books on Henry James, Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Gish, John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jenny Lind, and Theodore Roosevelt. His first publication appeared in 1927; his last in 1994. He even wrote novels (under the pseudonym Julian Forrest) about Joan of Arc and Mary, Queen of Scots. The list of his books includes more than sixty titles.^[2]

After his retirement from teaching, Wagenknecht stayed active as a writer into his nineties. A review of one of his books described him as a Jamesian hero,^[3] which is appropriate because he wrote three books on Henry James and personified the intelligence, perception and decency that James prized.^[4]

Criticism

Wagenknecht practiced a form of criticism pioneered by French

Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Herbert F. Smith commented: "The critical and biographical writing of Edward Wagenknecht represents the epitome of a style of subjective criticism which began with the nineteenth-century critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve."[5] Wagenknecht himself pointed out his debt to Bradford and Sainte-Beuve:

My specialty as a writer was the psychograph or character portrait, which I learned from Gamaliel Bradford, who, in turn, had been inspired by Sainte-Beuve. Bradford furnished an introduction to my first book of consequence, The Man Charles Dickens: A Victorian Portrait, and in fact placed it with Houghton Mifflin Co. I use the psychographic method in all my books which deal with individuals."^[2]

He also produced an enormous amount of

Though I have always written to please myself first of all, I have never been bashful about wooing the printing press, and I began sending my things out very early. For a long time, of course, they all came back, but in the long run nothing that was publishable failed of publication, though, except for book reviews, I have always been more successful with book publishers than with magazine editors. Here, again, I am sure my irrefragable independence has been the root cause. Magazine editors have 'policies' and 'interests.' So have I, and I have never considered dropping mine to take up those of somebody else.[7]

Selected works

References

External links

• Boston University Bridge obituary for Edward Wagenknecht
• Edward Wagenknecht at Library of Congress, with 86 library catalog records