Cleanth Brooks

Cleanth Brooks (October 16, 1906 – May 10, 1994) was an American literary critic and teacher.

Brooks was born in Murray, Kentucky. He went to college at Vanderbilt University and Tulane University. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

He wrote Understanding Poetry in 1938 with poet Robert Penn Warren. This helped to begin a way of looking at literature that is called "The New Criticism." He taught at Yale University from 1946 until 1975.

Books

1936. An Approach to Literature

1938. Understanding Poetry

1939. Modern Poetry and the Tradition

1943. Understanding Fiction

1947. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry

1957. Literary Criticism: A Short History

1963. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country

1964. The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren

1971. A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer's Craft

1973. American Literature: The Makers and the Making

1978. William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond

1983. William Faulkner: First Encounters

1985. The Language of the American South

1991. Historical Evidence and the Reading of Seventeenth-Century Poetry

References

1906 births

1994 deaths

American writers