Biography
Cleanth Brooks was born in Kentucky in 1906. He attended college at Vanderbilt, where he befriended and later wrote with with fellow Tennessee author Robert Penn Warren. Transferring to Tulane University, Brooks received a Rhodes scholarship which led him to England to continue his research in language. He began his teaching career in 1932 at Louisiana State University. In 1947, Brooks published his most famous book of criticism, The Well Wrought Urn, and also moved to Yale where he became a professor of rhetoric thirteen years later. In 1950, he and Warren published the classic Understanding Poetry: An Anthology for College Students. Though he wrote several critical studies on William Faulkner, Brooks was most widely known as the quintessential New Critic: his ideas, critical studies, and textbooks embodied everything that New Criticism stood for in practice and pedagogy.
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