Henry Nash Smith

Henry Nash Smith (September 29, 1906 – June 6, 1986) was a scholar of American culture and literature. He was co-founder of the academic discipline "American studies". He was also a noted Mark Twain scholar, and the curator of the Mark Twain Papers.

Life[]

Henry Nash Smith taught at the University of Minnesota,^[1] at the University of Texas, at Southern Methodist University, and, from 1953 to 1960, at the University of California, Berkeley, later becoming professor emeritus.^[2]

A decade after he moved to Berkeley in 1953, Smith immersed himself in a series of political actions, including the Free Speech movement and the anti-Vietnam war protests.^[3]

His Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950) gave its name to the Myth and Symbol School, and in academia was the basis of the paradigm of American Studies until the 1980s. Since it was based on his Ph.D. thesis and was the basis of a History of American Civilization course at Harvard University, its publication has been seen as the birth of that field. The book's topic was the collective perception of the 19th-century American West. Smith used sources such as dime novels and other items of popular culture. He was associated with Leo Marx and John William Ward.

In his essay Can American Studies Develop a Method? (American Quarterly 9 [1957]: 197-208), frequently anthologized, Smith advocated influential objectives and methodological views for the Myth and Symbol School.

Henry Nash Smith was married to Elinor Smith. They had three children: Harriet Elinor Smith, Janet Carol Smith, and Mayne Smith.^[4]

Smith died at the age of 79 on June 6, 1986, following an automobile accident on May 30, 1986, near Elko, Nevada.

Awards[]

• 1951 Bancroft Prize

Works[]

• Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, 1950 (reprint Vintage Books, 1957; Harvard University Press, 1970, ISBN 978-0-674-93955-4)
• Mark Twain of the Enterprise, 1957
• Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, Belknap Press, 1962
• Mark Twain's Fable of Progress: Political and Economic Ideas in A Connecticut Yankee, Rutgers University Press, 1964
• Popular Culture and Industrialism, 1865-1890, 1967
• Democracy and the Novel, 1978.

Further reading[]

• John William Ward 1955. Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age. New York: Oxford University Press.
• John William Ward. 1969 Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture . New York: Oxford University Press
• Marx, Leo (1964). The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press.[6]
• Marx, Leo (1989). The Pilot and the Passenger: Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press
• Ward, David C. 2004 Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic Berkley, California : University of California Press (John William Ward son's book, who went on to become Senior Historian at the National Portrait Gallery)
• Lewis, R. W. B. 1955. The American Adam; Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. [Chicago]: University of Chicago Press.
• Matthiessen, F. O. 1949. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Harvard, Boston
• Meyers, Marvin 1957 The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief Stanford Press, California
• Hofstadter, Richard. 1955. The Age of Reform: from Bryan to F.D.R.

References[]

See also[]

• etext of Virgin Land
• Synopsis of Virgin Land
• American literature, culture, and ideology: essays in memory of Henry Nash Smith, Beverly Rose Voloshin (ed), P. Lang, 1990, ISBN 978-0-8204-0850-7
• Guide to the Henry Nash Smith Papers at The Bancroft Library
• Works by or about Henry Nash Smith in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• John William Ward