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"I Become More Radical With Every Year": The Intellectual Odyssey of Vernon Louis Parrington

Among that select handful of American historians who have enjoyed the widest scholarly and popular admiration in the twentieth century, Vernon Louis Parrington is unique in several respects. In the first place, his fame rests entirely on a single work. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the first two volumes of Main Currents in American Thought, published in 1927 when he was fiftyfive years old. The third volume appeared in fragmentary form in 1930, a year after his untimely death at fifty-seven. His other scholarly output-two or three short pieces on aspects of American literature and about three dozen book reviews-would scarcely be sufficient to earn him tenure at any selfrespecting modern university. Parrington is also something of an oddity because his formal academic training had been extremely meager and never in the field of history. His highest degree was the Master of Arts awarded "in course" by Emporia College where he had been an undergraduate and then a young professor. He once described himself as "a literary refugee among the drilled hosts of the historians" (p. 197) and was attached to Departments of English throughout his career. Finally, it is difficult to think of any other figure who occupied so prominent a place in the scholarly life of this century about whom-until now-we knew so little. The longest published treatment of Vernon Parrington before this fulllength biography by H. Lark Hall was, of course, the stimulating and eloquent eighty-five-page discussion in Richard Hofstadter's The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968). Beyond that, those who were curious about Parrington resorted to the chapter in Robert Skotheim's American Intellectual Histories and Historians (1968), and to perhaps a half dozen short articles of varying value that have appeared since 1960, the most generally useful of them being, no doubt, Skotheim and Kermit Vanderbilt's "Vernon Louis Parrington: The Mind and Art of a Historian of Ideas," in the