AMERICANIST VISIONS: STANLEY T. WILLIAMS, WASHINGTON IRVING, AND CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

Abstract

1 R A M E R I C A N I S T V I S I O N S S T A N L E Y T . W I L L I A M S , W A S H I N G T O N I R V I N G , A N D C H R I S T O P H E R C O L U M B U S R O L E N A A D O R N O Stanley T. Williams (1888–1956), Sterling Professor of American Literature at Yale, played a major role in bringing American literature out of the shadows as a specialty subject within the English literature curriculum and into the spotlight, establishing a complete curriculum in American literature at Yale, his alma mater. His several books on American literary history spread his academic influence to universities in the United States, and his lecturing in Europe and teaching of American literature in settings from the University of Upsala in Sweden to the University of Mexico in Mexico City extended it abroad. A native of Meriden, Connecticut, Williams earned his B.A. degree at Yale the year The Yale Review was founded. His subsequent degrees were also from Yale (M.A., 1914; Ph.D., 1915), and he joined the Department of English as an instructor in 1915. Rising through the ranks, he was named Sterling Professor in 1944. He was chair of the department from 1939 to 1945 and, until nearly the time of his death at age sixty-eight, he served as director of graduate studies for American Studies. Williams had become interested in American literature when taking over a course previously taught by the influential William 2 A D O R N O Y Lyon Phelps, and legend has it (actually, my source, more than a decade ago, was a former student, Helen Rand Parish, in Professor Williams’s Masters seminar in 1928–29) that Williams would stride into the classroom and, while the English literature graduate students silently expressed their disdain (as only graduate students can) for his subject, would inform one and all that, apart from giving biographical details of the authors to be read and a few words about their historical circumstances, he would not be o√ering any formal seminars until such time as his students had read enough of the pertinent literary works to o√er intelligent discussion about them. He concentrated that course on Hawthorne , Emerson, and Melville, arguing that there were great contributions to be made to the study of American literature, particularly on those authors, and he was fond of citing Emerson’s rousing ‘‘The American Scholar’’ oration of 1837: ‘‘Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.’’ Williams’s scholarly work on North American literature stood out at the time because it was a ‘‘prophet’s cry in the wilderness,’’ but today his equally prophetic call for an interest in the Hispanic heritage in American literature is pertinent: these days the hemisphere -spanning reach of both Americanist and Latin Americanist scholars is a matter of fact, not speculative divination. All this probably came about because Williams’s most extensive Americanist scholarly contributions were devoted to ‘‘America’s first man of letters,’’ Washington Irving (1783–1859). Literally tracing Irving’s footsteps in Spain, Williams became persuaded of ‘‘the deep, compulsive influence’’ upon Irving of Spanish literature and culture, and it led him in his last book, published the year before his death, to ponder the ‘‘dignity and splendor of this Spanish tradition in the literature of the United States.’’ In two volumes, Williams’s The Spanish Background of American Literature (1955) examined the presence of interest in Spanish and Spanish American culture on this continent from the seventeenth-century English colonies through the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States to 1950. He then singled out for monographic study the ‘‘major interpreters in American Literature of Spanish and Spanish American culture,’’ whom Williams identified as Washington Irving, George Ticknor, William Hickling Prescott, William Cullen Bryant, A M E R I C A N I S T V I...