Brooks, Van Wyck

US critic, essayist, and historian

wrote "America's Coming-of-Age" 1915, "The Ordeal of Mark Twain" 1920, "The Flowering of New England" 1936 (Pulitzer Prize for history 1937)

• "The creative impulses of man are always at war with the possessive impulses."
• "The man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man."
• "As against having beautiful workshops, studios, etc., one writes best in a cellar on a rainy day."
• "Nothing is sadder than having worldly standards without worldly means."
• "The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible."