De Voto, Bernard Augustine [key], 1897–1955, American writer and editor, b. Ogden, Utah, grad. Harvard, 1920. He taught at Northwestern Univ. (1922–27) and then at Harvard (1929–36). After 1935 he conducted “The Easy Chair” in Harper's Magazine and from 1936 to 1938 was editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. His most important writing was in the field of American history and literature. His trilogy, The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri (1947), and The Course of Empire (1952), is a scholarly and vigorous study of the American West. He was the official editor of the Mark Twain manuscripts at Harvard and published Mark Twain's America (1932), Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), and Mark Twain at Work (1942). His other works include literary studies, The Literary Fallacy (1944) and The World of Fiction (1950); The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953), which he edited; and several novels.
See biography by W. Stegner (1974).
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