Bernard De Voto Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Bernard DeVoto was born in 1897 in Ogden, Utah, a childhood setting that fixed the American West at the center of his imagination. The landscapes and histories of the Intermountain West, from frontier trails to public lands and the communities that grew around them, formed the ground of his later work as a writer and historian. After early schooling in Utah he studied in the East, attending Harvard, where his interests in American literature, history, and criticism began to converge. The dual perspective of Western upbringing and Eastern academic training would shape his voice: unsentimental about myths, impatient with cant, and committed to evidence-based narrative.

Teacher, Critic, and The Easy Chair
In the 1920s DeVoto taught English at Northwestern University, where he refined the habits of close reading and broad synthesis that would mark his essays and books. He soon left full-time teaching for writing and criticism, contributing to leading magazines. In 1935 he assumed The Easy Chair, the long-running column in Harper's Magazine, and wrote it for two decades. In that forum he developed a national reputation for lucid, skeptical, and sometimes combative commentary. He examined culture and politics with a historian's memory and a reporter's appetite for evidence, defending civil liberties and intellectual standards while exposing quackery, demagoguery, and the erosion of public institutions. The column made him a central figure in midcentury American letters, a writer as comfortable with the archive as with the day's front-page controversies.

Historian of the American West
DeVoto's reputation rests above all on his narrative histories of the West, where he joined scholarly rigor to storytelling. The Year of Decision: 1846 mapped a turning point, when migration, war, science, and ambition intersected to redirect national destiny. Across the Wide Missouri, which won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for History, reconstructed the fur-trade era and the world of mountain men, traders, and Native nations, interweaving economic systems with personal adventure and landscape. The Course of Empire, which received the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1953, widened his lens to the centuries-long struggle to grasp the North American continent, from early exploration through continental expansion. He also edited an influential abridgment of The Journals of Lewis and Clark, bringing readers vividly into the expedition's daily problem-solving, diplomacy, and scientific observation. In these works DeVoto insisted that Western history is national history, and that the West's peoples, ecologies, and markets are inseparable from the American story.

Scholar of Mark Twain
Alongside Western history DeVoto became a distinguished Mark Twain scholar. He edited The Portable Mark Twain, introducing a new generation to Twain's range, and prepared Mark Twain in Eruption from unpublished materials, helping to clarify Twain's late style and his engagement with the politics and culture of his time. DeVoto's editorial work balanced fidelity to primary sources with clear framing, and his critical essays on Twain argued for the writer's centrality to American realism and democratic speech. Through this scholarship DeVoto joined the custodians of Twain's legacy and extended his reach within American literary studies.

Conservation and Public Lands
From his earliest columns through his final books DeVoto was a vigorous defender of public lands and conservation. He exposed schemes to privatize or exhaust federal ranges, forests, and watersheds, and he argued that short-term extraction would erode the national inheritance the public domain represented. His essays, including the widely discussed The West Against Itself, attacked the politics of backroom deals and the capture of policy by private interests. He praised the work of the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies when they acted in the public interest, and he urged readers to see the stakes of conservation not as regional quarrels but as questions of democratic stewardship. Younger Western writers, notably Wallace Stegner, found in DeVoto's example a model for tethering literary craft to civic responsibility; Stegner later honored him in the biography The Uneasy Chair.

Personal Life and Collaborations
DeVoto married Avis MacVicar DeVoto, whose sharp editorial eye and literary judgment became essential to his work. She was his first reader, his critic, and a partner in the rhythms of research, correspondence, and deadlines that governed their household. Through The Easy Chair the couple also entered the orbit of cooks and editors when a column on kitchen knives prompted a letter from Julia Child. Avis replied, and a rich correspondence followed; she championed the manuscript that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking and encouraged the work that Julia Child and her collaborators were developing. That exchange, which also brought Paul Child into their circle, illuminates how DeVoto's public writing opened unexpected private alliances and how Avis's gifts extended his influence beyond history and criticism.

Recognition and Final Years
By the early 1950s DeVoto stood among the nation's best-known men of letters. The Pulitzer Prize for Across the Wide Missouri and the National Book Award for The Course of Empire recognized the scale and clarity of his historical vision, and invitations to lecture and advise followed. He continued to write The Easy Chair while researching and editing primary sources, maintaining a demanding pace. In 1955 he died in New York City after a career that had stretched from classroom to archive to the national magazine page, leaving in progress ideas and plans for further studies of the West and its institutions.

Legacy
Bernard DeVoto's legacy endures in three converging lines. As a historian he proved that narrative need not simplify, that the West's conflicts and convergences can be told with scholarly care and literary force. As an editor and critic he preserved and clarified major American voices, especially Mark Twain, insisting on standards that continue to guide textual scholarship. As a public intellectual he defended the commonwealth of public lands and argued that democracy is sustained by informed, vigilant citizens. The people around him, Avis DeVoto as collaborator and advocate, Wallace Stegner as biographer and heir, and figures like Julia Child who found unexpected support through his household, reveal the breadth of his engagements. His books remain widely read, their sentences charged with the conviction that the American past is neither a closed archive nor a frontier myth, but a living argument about who owns the land, who tells the story, and how hard-won knowledge should guide the future.

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