Brooks, Van Wyck (1886–1963)

US literary critic and biographer. His five-volume Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America, 1800–1915 (1936–52) was an influential series of critical works on US literature. The first volume The Flowering of New England (1936) won a Pulitzer Prize.

An earlier work, America's Coming-of-Age (1915), concerned the Puritan heritage and its effects on American literature. His other works include studies of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.