Bernard DeVoto

WHEN BERNARD DEVOTO died on November 13, 1955, he was one of the most visible and most controversial literary figures in America, and had been for thirty years. Though he had begun as a novelist, it was in other roles that most of his public knew him: as historian, essayist, editor, hack writer, pamphleteer, custodian of the Bill of Rights and the public conscience and the public lands. "A literary department store," he called himself, and he was vehement in every department. Readers responded to him with equal vehemence. Many respected and revered him and depended on him for their thinking and their courage in public issues. Some hated him with a passion. All had ample opportunity to know his opinions, for he was not only a frequent contributor to all sorts of magazines, but he was for a short time (November 1936 to March 1938) editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, and for twenty years, from 1935 until his death, he wrote the Easy Chair in Harper's Magazine, the oldest and perhaps the most influential column in American journalism.

The staff at Harper's loved him as a curmudgeon with a heart of mush; they said he collected underdogs the way a blue serge suit collects lint. John Fischer, the editor of Harper's during DeVoto's last years, thought of him as "a combat journalist, who charged headlong into any public controversy that got his dander up,"and who "enjoyed a fight more than any man I ever knew." Malcolm Cowley, who had felt the DeVoto lash early, did not meet the ogre until much later, and to his surprise found him personally a pleasant man. But when he got in front of a typewriter, Cowley said ruefully, "how he did like to swing the shellalagh!"

From the time in the mid-twenties when he published his first essays in H. L. Mencken's American Mercury, his career had been controversy. He had broken spears against the progressive schools and the football colleges, against Van Wyck Brooks and the young intellectuals, against the literary censors of Watch and Ward, against the Communists and Popular Fronters, against J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, against Senator McCarthy, the Reece Committee, and other official enemies of civil liberties, against academic historians and southern revisionists, against the "beautiful thinking" of the literary who hunted in pack, against western stockmen and their political backers. To some he seemed merely contrary: when the public weathervane veered left, he veered right; when it veered right, he veered left. In the 1930s the Daily Worker called him a fascist. By the 1950s, the Worker was quoting his Easy Chairs with approval, old antagonists such as F. O. Matthiessen and the editors of New Republic were his somewhat astonished allies, and Senator McCarthy was denouncing "one Richard DeVoto" as a communist.

Early in 1937, pondering DeVoto's aggressive editorship of the Saturday Review of Literature, Edmund Wilson found him difficult to label, and rather plaintively called on him to stand and declare himself in the ideological struggles of his time. Who was he? What did he believe in? What did he want? Why was he so angry?

Some of the questions were rhetorical, some unanswerable. DeVoto could never have explained why he was so angry, any more than a fish could have explained why it breathed through gills. And Wilson had to know who DeVoto was–he had been around for considerably more than a decade, in postures of constant challenge. But there was every reason why Wilson could not understand DeVoto. There were enough differences of background and belief to make them incomprehensible to one another, though Wilson was probably more comprehensible to DeVoto than DeVoto was to Wilson. For DeVoto was a westerner, something easterners have seldom understood, and a belligerent westerner at that. Moreover, he was a shirtsleeve democrat, almost a populist–a Declaration-of-Independence, Bill-of-Rights, Manifest-Destiny American democrat, inhabiting intellectual territory that the then-reigning arbiters of opinion thought uninhabitable.

Born in Ogden, Utah, on January 11, 1897, son of a Mormon mother and a Catholic father, DeVoto had studied first with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart and later in the Ogden public schools, had attended the University of Utah for one year, had transferred to Harvard, had been uprooted from there before graduation by World War I, had gone to OTC and been commissioned a second lieutenant of infantry, had served as a musketry instructor at Camp Perry, Ohio, and after being demobilized had returned to Harvard to graduate, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, with the class of 1920. After an interlude in Ogden made disastrous by a nervous breakdown, his mother's death, a collapsed love affair, and his hatred of his native town, he had escaped to a job as instructor of English at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois, where he shortly married the prettiest girl in his freshman class, Helen Avis MacVicar, and set out to write his way to fame.

By the time Edmund Wilson was asking his questions in New Republic, DeVoto had already left Northwestern for Harvard, and Harvard for New York, and had written four novels: The Crooked Mile (1924), an unfriendly portrait of a western town very like Ogden; Chariot of Fire (1926), about a frontier prophet not unlike the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith; The House of Sun-Goes-Down (1928), a sequel to The Crooked Mile; and We Accept with Pleasure (1934), set in Boston and Cambridge during the Sacco and Vanzetti trial. Before he was done, DeVoto would publish a fifth novel, Mountain Time (1947) under his own name, and under the pseudonym of John August four others: Troubled Star (1939), Rain Before Seven (1940), Advance Agent (1942), and The Woman in the Picture (1944). Before or after 1937, and under any name, his novels never brought him the recognition and reputation he hoped for, but the pseudonymous books, all serials written for Collier's, subsidized his more important writing. In the preface to The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), the first of his great trilogy of western histories, DeVoto ironically acknowledged the "periodic assistance from Mr. John August" that had made the book possible.

The major accomplishments were still in the future when Wilson called on DeVoto to stand and deliver, but the accomplishments of the past were not to be overlooked. Besides teaching at Northwestern and at Harvard–and his teaching had the same challenging provocativeness as his essays–DeVoto had had two years of experience in upsetting applecarts as editor of the previously stuffy Harvard Graduates' Magazine (1930–1932). He had been general editor of a short-lived but admirable series of reprints of lost American classics, the Americana Deserta series. In 1936 he had collected in a book, Forays and Rebuttals, twenty-three of his essays which stood the test of time and a hard rereading. (This was the first of four such collections; the others are Minority Report, 1940; The Hour, 1951 ; and The Easy Chair, 1955). And he had published in 1932 the book that made him an instant reputation not only as a fierce controversialist but as a student of American society, especially frontier society. Mark Twain's America, which he captioned "an essay in the correction of ideas," examined Van Wyck Brooks's theory, expressed in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, that Mark Twain was stultified by a puritanical culture and a puritanical mother, and reduced by these malign influences from a potential artist to a mere humorist. It demolished Brooks's theory with a thoroughness and violence that appalled and infuriated Brooks's friends; but it also demonstrated Bernard DeVoto as a social historian of insight, range, and formidable learning, and forecast the historian of the West who was still to be developed in him.

In his Foreword, DeVoto had rejected the temptation to explain Mark Twain simply or according to any formula, as he accused Brooks of doing. "I do not believe in simplicities about art, artists, or the subjects of criticism," he wrote. "I have no theory about Mark Twain. It is harder to conform one's book to ascertainable fact than to theorize, and harder to ascertain facts than to ignore them. In literature, beautiful simplicities usually result from the easier method, and, in literature, the armchair assertion that something must be true is the begetter of unity."

There, if Wilson had looked, was the explanation of DeVoto. Throughout his career, while opponents accused him of flipping back and forth, he held to the tests of fact and experience. Viewed in retrospect, his principles reveal themselves as completely consistent. He was a rock in the surf of changing minds, fickle fashions, liberal hesitations, doubts, recantations, and gods that failed. Though his interests moved steadily away from literature toward history and politics and conservation, he distrusted a priori thinking wherever he found it, and his nickname among his colleagues at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, where he taught for a good many summers during the 1930s and 1940s, was Ad Hoc.

Over a period of three decades, his writings say it in a hundred contexts. In a double editorial in the Saturday Review for February 13, 1937, he said it for Edmund Wilson, who had complained about his lack of "articulated ideas."

"This," he said, "is a demand for a gospel, and I have been acquainted with it since my earliest days. I was brought up in a religion which taught me that man was imperfect but might expect God's mercy–but I was surrounded by a revealed religion founded by a prophet of God, composed of people on their way to perfection, and possessed of an everlasting gospel. I early acquired a notion that all gospels were false and all my experience since then has confirmed it . . . I distrust absolutes. Rather, I long ago passed from distrust of them to opposition. And with them let me include prophecy, simplification, generalization, abstract logic, and especially the habit of mind which consults theory first and experience only afterward."

In a time which spent much of its intellectual and emotional energy debating whether America would go communist or fascist, and when most of the literary leaned left, that pragmatic, skeptical, equilibristic stance was glaringly unorthodox. Distrusting New York as the nest where all the current orthodoxies were laid and hatched, DeVoto consistently earned New York's dislike and disapproval. He refused all the fashionable hooks, however attractively baited. In 1943 he said, "Politically, I am a New Dealer on Election Day and a critic of the New Deal at other times." In 1950 he said, "I am a half-Mugwump, 60 per cent New Dealer, 90 per cent Populist dirtroads historian." In 1944, in a last charge against accepted literary opinion, he put together some lectures delivered at the University of Indiana under the title The Literary Fallacy, in which he again defended American society from the commonplace assumption that it was a "great gas-lighted Barbarity" that destroyed its artists. He said instead that its artists had betrayed and misrepresented their society, and called down on his head the wrath of all the literary, especially Sinclair Lewis, whose attack in The Saturday Review of April 15, 1944 will probably persist in our literary history simply by virtue of its ad hominem virulence.

Through the literary unrest of the twenties, the leftist temptations of the thirties, the crisis patriotism of the war years, and the demoralizing witch-hunts of the late forties and early fifties, DeVoto reiterated, in woodwinds, strings, and brass, the declaration of belief to which he had been forced by Wilson; and as the political air darkened, so did the DeVoto analysis. Ideas as systematic constructs, ideas unresponsive to the facts of a nation's history and the habits and needs of people, were not merely intellectually offensive but politically dangerous, no matter whether well-meant or ill-meant. (DeVoto's onetime intimate and surrogate father, Robert Frost, put it succinctly in a comment on Henry Wallace. "Henry," he said, "is bound to reform you whether you want to be reformed or not.")

To a mind as truculently independent as DeVoto's, all dogma, whether in religion, literature, history, teaching, or any other endeavor, suppressed thought. In politics, it was a constant threat to freedom. Passionate political dogmas led to machinegun government; and "idealism, whether moral or metaphysical or literary, may be defined as a cross-lots path to the psychopathic ward, Berchtesgaden, and St. Bartholomew's Eve. Absolutes mean absolutism."

In the prewar and war years when left-leaning intellectuals had more or less cornered American publications (with the marked exceptions of Harper's and The Saturday Review), DeVoto was as completely anathema to the political intellectuals as he had earlier been to the literary. He got his revenge, and could not resist airing it, when the faithful began to recant and fall off the Moscow Express, as Malcolm Cowley put it, after the Moscow Trials and especially the Hitler-Stalin pact. In a 1951 Easy Chair entitled "The Ex-Communists," DeVoto commented on these born-again democrats: "The road to an understanding of democracy crosses the communist east forty. Before you can add a column of figures correctly you must first add them wrong. He who would use his mind must first lose it. Various excommunist intellectuals are offering themselves on just that basis as authorities about what has happened and guides to what must be done. Understand, I am right now because I was wrong then. Only the ex-communist can understand communism. Trust me to lead you aright now because I tried earlier to lead you astray. My intelligence has been vindicated in that it made an all-out commitment to error."

In DeVoto's view, the ex-communist had arrived, proud of his mistakes, at precisely the place where any noncommunist American had stood all along."Where, for God's sake, was he when they were distributing minds?" One thing he could be sure of–he himself had been more stoutly at the barricades than the twice-born ones. During the war he had repeatedly tried to free the hands of his friend Elmer Davis, then head of the Office of War Information, to disseminate information instead of soothing syrup and propaganda. "The way to have an informed public opinion is to inform the public."And in the October 1949 Easy Chair he had capped his long career in defense of civil liberties with "Due Notice to the FBI," an essay that made him stronger and more lasting friends than all his controversies together had made him enemies. He would no longer, he said, discuss anyone in private with any FBI operative. If it was his duty to do so, he would discuss anyone, but only in court, and in the presence of his attorney, not for the dubious uses of a system of informers and secret police.

"I like a country where it's nobody's damned business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears and where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California. I like a country where no college-trained flatfeet collect memoranda about us and ask judicial protection for them, a country where when someone makes statements about us to officials he can be held to account. We had that kind of country only a little while ago and I'm for getting it back."

That was who Bernard DeVoto was, and had been, and would continue to be–as dedicated a cultural patriot as the country has had since Emerson, light years away from the literary and political coteries with their Anglophile, Francophile, or Russophile addictions, and 90°ree; divergent from H. L. Mencken, under whose enthusiastic Booboisie-thumping tutelage he had begun. In spite of its frequent failure to live up to itself and its willingness to listen to siren voices, America was what he believed in. He believed in its political principles and its democratic strength, in its always-tumultuous present and its probably-distracted future, and he was stimulated and invigorated by its past.

His enemies called him a Philistine. He did not mind–he even embraced the role. And before he was done he would make three major contributions to the American tradition. 1) His essays on civil liberties and public affairs (see especially those in The Easy Chair) stand rereading better than the work of any commentator of his time except E. B. White, who for some years shared the pages of Harper's with him and helped make it the most influential magazine of the period. A few of these essays, such as "Due Notice to the FBI" and "Guilt by Distinction," belong among the very best statements of the American gospels. 2) His essays on the West, especially those written during the late 1940s and early 1950s in an almostsinglehanded and spectacularly successful attempt to forestall a grab of public lands by western resource interests, explained the West and the public lands to the rest of the nation as no one else had succeeded in doing, and gave him unquestioned leadership in the modern conservation movement. And 3) his histories, among which one should probably classify Mark Twain's America, finally won him the praise and recognition that his novels had failed to win him, including the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes and the National Book Award.

Before he left a floundering Suturday Review in the spring of 1938 and returned to Cambridge, he had undertaken the curatorship of the Mark Twain papers. Out of an eight-year struggle with those and with the Mark Twain Estate would come a book of critical essays, Mark Twain at Work (1942), as well as two collections of previously unpublished Mark Twain writings: Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), and Letters from the Earth, the latter held up by the scruples of Mark Twain's daughter and not published until after DeVoto's death. He continued writing the Easy Chair, to which he always gave a high priority. To support himself he called several times on John August. But to satisfy his own deepest needs, to focus his mind, to bring together what he knew and what he believed about America and especially the West, he began work on the history of a critical year, the year 1846, in which, he felt, the continental surge of Manifest Destiny was consummated, and by the end of which the forces that would bring about the Civil War had all clicked into place like cartridges into the magazine of a rifle. Forced out of teaching and editing, he was ready to become a historian.

Those who had read him on the subject of Ogden, Utah, might have been surprised. Those who had heard him scorn the literary might be astonished. For the historian in DeVoto, when he finally emerged, was a historian of the West, and he was both literary and romantic. The impulse that had driven him to write novels lingered in him like an embarrassing adolescent acne: he approached the history of the West as an enthusiast. Also, the training he had given himself in the handling of character, action, and scene asserted itself strongly when he began to deal with the historical characters and actions of the westward movement. He wrote history like a romantic novelist.

His view of American history was as sweeping as Parkman's. He saw it as a vast panorama, the greatest story in the record of civilized man, shot with lurid colors, strenuous adventures, appalling risks, spectacular follies, broken dreams, outrageous crimes, the loftiest heroisms and the profoundest tragedies–a panorama rolled forward by mysterious and irresistible forces, social and political, of which the most potent came to be called Manifest Destiny. And if readers asked how someone who thought of the West as a place first plundered by eastern capital and then vulgarized by its own efforts could be so exhilarated by the story of how it was explored and opened, DeVoto could have answered that in this, at least, he was orthodox. Nearly every western writer of quality since Ed Howe wrote The Story of a Country Town in 1883 has demonstrated the same ambivalence. Willa Cather did, Mari Sandoz did. Bernard DeVoto did it at the top of his voice. The western present, this feeling goes, is vulgarized and spoiled. The western past was adventure, high purpose, grand country, unspoiled magnificence, an unparalleled spectacle of civilization at its most daring making contact with the virgin continent at its most splendid.

"Sure you're romantic about American history," DeVoto wrote Catherine Drinker Bowen. ". . . [I]t is the most romantic of all histories . . . If the mad, impossible voyage of Columbus or Cartier or La Salle or Coronado or John Ledyard is not romantic, if the stars did not dance in the sky when the Constitutional Convention met, if Atlantis has any landscape stranger or the other side of the moon any lights or colors or shapes more unearthly than the customary homespun of Lincoln or the morning coat of Jackson, well, I don't know what romance is. Ours is a story mad with the impossible, it is by chaos out of dream . . . and of our dreams there are two things above all others to be said, that only madmen could have dreamed them or would have dared to–and that we have shown a considerable faculty for making them come true."

The Civil War, DeVoto often said, was the single greatest subject available to an American historian. For one reason or another–probably that he himself derived from neither the North nor the South–he felt unqualified to write about the great testing of the Republic. But the second greatest subject, the westward movement, he did feel qualified for, by birth, experience, training, and understanding. He saw the West whole, and he saw it, moreover, in context, as part of the nation's development. A boyhood in the canyons of the Wasatch, coupled with a long exile in the East, had sharpened his senses to the western landscape and western air and light. Some significant part of his beginning as historian may be traced to nostalgia. That should not minimize the knowledge, the masterful overview, that gave his histories scope. It only allowed him to do what he said The Year of Decision: 1846 aimed to do–"to realize the pre-Civil War, Far Western frontier as personal experience." In both vision and evocativeness he more closely resembles Parkman than any other historian, though in style they are very different.

Like Parkman, DeVoto found a great theme and developed it through several volumes, though he characteristically found his embracing theme inductively, by the kind of accident that after the fact looks inevitable. His trilogy was begun without a plan wider than the first volume, and was written backwards. The Year of Decision: 1846, written first and published in 1943, deals with the year in which westward expansion reached its climax with the seizing of the Southwest and California and the settlement of the Oregon question–with the completion of the continental nation. Across the Wide Missouri, written second and published in 1947, developed out of a minor journalistic job–a contract to write captions for some newly discovered watercolors of the fur-trade West by Alfred Jacob Miller. It covers the peak fur-trade years 1832–1838. And the final volume, The Course of Empire, published in 1952, reaches back to the beginnings and beyond the beginnings into the rumor and speculation and fable that preceded and accompanied the first continental explorations; and it ends with the greatest of American explorations, the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804–1806, which first brought America to the Pacific.

The trilogy, DeVoto said in his preface to The Course of Empire, is to be read as a gloss on a passage in Lincoln's Second Annual Message: that the territory of the United States "is well adapted to be the home of one national family, and it is not well adapted for two or more." Read chronologically, with Lincoln's remark in mind, the three volumes do have a strong unifying theme. They trace the development of the continental mind and the sense of union that made the outcome of the Civil War inevitable. Tracing that development, DeVoto deals not only with North American geography, but with all the misconceptions out of which it gradually emerged as reality; with the imperial conflicts among Spain, France, England, and Russia; with the effects of European intrusions upon the Indian tribes and cultures; with the growth of the raw American republic which inherited what the empires fought for; with, in short, no less than the discovery and exploration and conquest of the North American continent and the formation of the American nation and the American people.

Not a small task for one who described himself as a journalist, a man trained not as a historian but as a novelist, and a man who, without an academic job to support him and without a single foundation grant in his entire life, had to support his family and numerous dependents by his unceasing industry as a pamphleteer and hack. He stole the time for it as he could, between Easy Chairs, magazine articles, serials, public controversies, book reviews, and all the demands of a furious twelve-to-fifteen-hour day, and in the end these were the books that represented and justified him.

But no one could call Bernard DeVoto an orthodox historian. For one thing, the romantic novelist in him takes advantage of every opportunity for drama and color. As he told his friend Garrett Mattingly, most historians stop on second because there is some theory in the profession that historians do not hit home runs. DeVoto himself never stopped on second if there was a chance of going to third. Though he would not invent dramatic scenes, he would take advantage of everything his sources offered him–as, for instance, he took advantage of the spectacle of the fur rendezvous on the upper Green River in Across the Wide Missouri, and the pitiful flight of the Mormons from Nauvoo, the march of the Mormon Battalion, the ghastly camp of the Donner party, and much else, in The Year of Decision.

He was able to recreate these scenes with extraordinary vividness, partly because he relied by preference on firsthand accounts, partly because he himself knew the West, partly because he thought like a novelist and his subject was people in action. But also, by trial and error during the writing of The Year of Decision, he had devised a narrative method that he called "simultaneity." Faced with the problem of carrying forward all the complex actions of his climactic year, he learned to drive them like a twenty-mule team, with his hands full of lines. The Mormon exodus from Nauvoo; the adventures of young Francis Parkman in and around Fort Laramie; the glory-hunting of John Charles Frémont and Commodore Stockton, and the quiet diplomacy of Consul Larkin, in California; the progress of the Mexican War from bluster to declaration to comic opera to deadly combat that trained most of the officers of the greater war that would follow in fifteen years; General Kearney's march to Santa Fe and on to the Pacific, with its subplot of the Mormon Battalion; the slow doom of the Donner-Reed party rocking toward its climax in the Sierra–these and other strands move, pause, start again, meet, interweave, illuminate one another. It is a virtuoso performance both in the dexterity of its handling and the vividness with which these actions, the men who made them, and the country they were made in are realized.

The method devised for The Year of Decision worked even better for Across the Wide Missouri, which, starting as a set of captions and the story of the western excursions of the Scottish sportsman William Drummond Stewart, evolved into a brilliant history of the mountain fur trade during its peak years. The great men of the fur trade–Bridger, Fitzpatrick, Joe Meek, Black Harris, the enigmatic Captain Bonneville–are all there. So are the missionaries who passed through them on their way to Oregon, Marcus Whitman and his opulent wife Narcissa, Henry Spalding who had wooed Narcissa and lost, and had married frail and faded Eliza on the bounce. The two couples shared a tent, not always amicably, all the way across the plains and mountains. And the Indians are there–Sioux, Shoshones, Nez Percés, Blackfeet, in their turmoil of incessant war. Tying all this together and giving it depth and color are the Scottish laird and his party, including the painter Alfred Jacob Miller, sketching and making watercolors of all they saw. If Across the Wide Missouri seems now a greater achievement, a more brilliant evocation, than The Year of Decision, put it down to the greater simplicity of the action, the smaller cast of characters, the more manageable scope; but also to the fact that it was the fur trade, above all other aspects of western history, that had fascinated DeVoto ever since boyhood, and to the further fact that the fur trade had mainly taken place, as it were, in his boyhood backyard. His very first essay in history, back in 1926, had been called "The Mountain Men," and it was purely celebratory. His second, the next year, had been a piece on the Platte Valley route of migration called "The Great Medicine Road." In more ways than one, Across the Wide Missouri was a culmination, the one book that Bernard DeVoto had been born to write.

But it did not quite complete him. His two histories, between them, covered only the years from 1832 to 1846, and though he had looked ahead from 1846 to the consequences of that year's fateful decisions, and so did not have to deal with them, he had done little back-looking to the actions that had brought Europeans to North America and finally across the wide Missouri. That story he told in The Course of Empire.

It began with the feeling that Lewis and Clark were somehow central to all western history, but as he wrote Garrett Mattingly in December 1948, "There's no reason to write a book about how a well-conducted party got to the mouth of the Columbia and back . . . The only thing worth my writing or anyone's writing is a book that says, hey, this seems to have been left out of the picture." What seemed to have been left out of the picture occupied his mind and disturbed his sleep for several years, and the deeper he got into it the more it maddened him. He could not dramatize it as he had dramatized the plains crossing of Narcissa Whitman or the march of the Mormon battalion. There were few distinctive portraits in it, and no room for the blunt judgments of character that had offended some orthodox historians in the earlier books. His whole method had to be adjusted or abandoned. In October 1950, he again wrote to Mattingly:

"I have, in nomine Patris et Filii, this day got the French out of North America. One year to the day, and three million words, after I began a book that had no intention of getting the French into North America . . . So where are we? With thirteen million words written, or by our Lady some two score million, we have now accounted for 229 years that do not enter at all into my book, and have only forty more years to go, or say an even million words . . . before we reach the beginning of my book and, with a sigh of infinite satisfaction and a suffusing glow of happy realization that only ten million words lie ahead, take up a blank, virgin sheet of paper and write at the top of it Page One."

He had, Mattingly advised, a mild case of regressus historicus. And he was writing another kind of history from what he had essayed before. He couldn't expect to skip across the centuries at the same pace, and with the same attention to the roadside, as when he had been walking wide-eyed through a single year. But there was another reason why DeVoto had difficulty with this third volume. He found no way to treat it in terms of characteristic figures and characteristic actions, no way to select from it parts that would stand for the whole. As a historian, he was incurably what he and Robert Frost called a "synecdochist." He operated by sampling, and gave his samples vividness. In The Course of Empire he had to deal much less particularly with the whole thing. Or almost did. He was saved by the Lewis and Clark expedition, to which he gave the final 120 pages of a book that had begun with a letter from Columbus to Isabella of Spain. That culminating adventure completed a circuit, found a sort of Northwest Passage, and confirmed in the Americans the growing perception that they were fated to spread their country from sea to sea.

Different though it is, The Course of Empire is essential to the continental theme, and the adventure which concludes it is put into the context of centuries. When he had put a final footnote to the task by editing the Lewis and Clark Journals, DeVoto had finished his job as historian and– though he had to go on writing the journalism that supported him and his family–as writer. He died of a heart attack in New York City, where he would not have wanted to be found dead, on November 13, 1955.

WALLACE STEGNER Los Altos Hills, California

Bibliographical Note

The novels which DeVoto wrote under his own name are The Crooked Mile (N.Y.: Balch, 1924), a scathing portrait of commercialism and vulgarity in a western town; The Chariot of Fire (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1926), which records the career of a midwestern religious zealot with echoes of Peter Cartwright, Joseph Dylkes, and Joseph Smith; The House of Sun-Goes-Down (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1928), a novel of post-Civil War migration into the West; We Accept With Pleasure (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), set in the Boston of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial; and Mountain Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), whose background is the medical profession and whose action takes a brilliant young doctor from New York back to the West of his childhood. The four novels written under the name John August are frankly entertainments.

A much more important contribution are the essays and articles DeVoto published in Harper's (especially in The Easy Chair), Atlantic, The Saturday Review of Literature, and many other periodicals. The best of these he collected in a series of volumes, beginning with Forays and Rebuttals (Boston: Little, Brown, 1936), and continuing through Minority Report (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), and The Easy Chair (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955). The topics covered in these essays are of the greatest variety, but the successive volumes show DeVoto's principal interests moving from education, censorship, and a Menckenesque ridicule of American social habits to literary criticism, often with a psychoanalytical stance, civil rights, politics, and the problems of the public lands. The West, both as history and as present reality, is a consistent preoccupation, and the essays resisting raids on the public lands made DeVoto during the last decade of his life the real leader of the conservation movement in the United States.

Collections of essays on restricted subjects are The World of Fiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), a treatise on the art of fiction; The Literary Fallacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), attacking the theory that America is a cultural wasteland that destroys its writers and artists; and The Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), a humorous hymn to alcohol compiled out of several Easy Chairs and other essays.

Mark Twain's America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1932), in which DeVoto thunderously disputed Van Wyck Brooks's theory, expressed in The Ordeal of Mark Twain, that Mark Twain was harmed as an artist by the puritanism and commercialism of his society, properly belongs with DeVoto's works of western history. But a second Mark Twain book, Mark Twain at Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), contains three penetrating critical essays on DeVoto's favorite writer; and he also edited out of the Mark Twain papers, of which he was curator from 1938 to 1946, two volumes of previously unpublished Mark Twain writings: Mark Twain in Eruption (N.Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1940) and Letters from the Earth (N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1962).

DeVoto's crowning achievement was his trilogy of western histories: The Year of Decision: 1846 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), a brilliant recreation of a critical year in the West and in the nation; Across the Wide Missouri (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), a colorful account of the peak years of the mountain fur trade; and The Course of Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), chronicling the history of exploration on the North American continent from Columbus to Lewis and Clark. This trilogy, which should be read in reverse order, was capped by DeVoto's shortened edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953).

The best bibliography is that by Julius P. Barclay in Bowen, Mirrielees, Schlesinger, and Stegner, Four Portraits and One Subject: Bernard DeVoto (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963). The DeVoto papers are at Stanford University.