DeVoto, Bernard Augustine (1897-1955)

US author, critic, and historian. He held an instructorship at Northwestern University, joined the Harvard faculty, and then became editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. He published three surveys of the exploration and settlement of the American West.

Born in Ogden, Utah, he taught marksmanship in the army during World War I, before graduating from Harvard and becoming a schoolteacher in Utah. He had published three novels before going to teach at Harvard. His critical study, Mark Twain's America, appeared in 1932, and, in 1953, he produced an edition of the journals of Meriwether Lewis and George Rogers Clark.