Mark Van Doren
From Philosopedia
Mark Van Doren (13 June 1894 - 10 December 1972)
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic was born in Hope, Illinois, the son of Vermilion County's physician. He was the younger brother of Carl Van Doren, who also became a leading professor. In 1914, Van Doren earned his B.A. from the University of Illinois. In 1920 he earned his Ph. D. at Columbia.
From 1920 to 1959 Van Doren taught at Columbia University. Also he was on the staff of The Nation. His students at Columbia included the poets John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lax as well as the Japanologist and interpreter of Japanese literature Donald Keene, author and activist Whittaker Chambers, and writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Van Doren helped Ginsberg avoid jail time in June 1949 by testifying on his behalf when Ginsberg was arrested as an accessory to crimes carried out by Herbert Huncke and others, and was an important influence on Merton, both in Merton's conversion to Catholicism and Merton's poetry. Since 1962, students of Columbia College have honored a great teacher at the school each year with the Mark Van Doren Award.
In 1922 he married the novelist Dorothy Graffe Van Doren, and their son, Charles (born February 12, 1926), briefly achieved renown as the winner of the rigged game show, Twenty-One. He semi-retired in 1953 and gave up teaching altogether in 1959, following the scandal involving his son Charles and the fixing of a popular television program. In the film Quiz Show, which was about the fact that Charles had been given answers to questions before the show, Mark Van Doren was played by Paul Scofield, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.
In 1949, asked his views about humanism, Van Doren did not respond in writing but told a student writing a thesis for his M.A. in Lionel Trilling's class, "Like Lionel, I'm a humanist in the sense that our views are founded in the humanities."
The funeral for Van Doren, who died in Torrington, Connecticut, aged 78, was led by his widow, Dorothy, who arranged a service that included actor Larry Gates reading a poem from Catullus's "On the Death of a Brother."
{WAS, 1949}
