Vernon Louis Parrington

Vernon Louis Parrington (1871–1929) was an American literary historian. Born in Illinois and raised on a Kansas farm, he studied at Harvard, taught English and coached football at the University of Oklahoma until he was dismissed in a political purge, and from 1908 was professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. Main Currents in American Thought, his history of American ideas from the Puritans to the twentieth century, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1928 for its first two volumes; the third was left unfinished at his death in England and published in 1930. Its Jeffersonian, economic reading of literature dominated American studies for a generation.