William K. Wimsatt, Jr. Papers 2

William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr. was born on November 17, 1907 in Washington, D.C., the son of William Kurtz Wimsatt, a surgeon, and Bertha McSherry Wimsatt. He recieved his B.A. degree (summa cum laude) from Georgetown University in 1928, his M.A. degree from the Catholic University of America in 1929, and his Ph.D. in English Literature from Yale University in 1939. In 1944, he married Margaret Elizabeth Hecht, and they had two children, William Alexander and James Christopher. He served as head of the English Department at Portsmouth Priory School, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, from 1930 to 1935. After he received his Ph.D., he became a member of the Yale faculty for thirty-five years. A specialist on 18th-century literature, Wimsatt wrote or edited a significant number of works on the period, including "The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson" (1941); "Selected Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope" (1951); "Boswell for Defense" (1959); "Samuel Johnson on Shekespeare" (1960); "The Portraits of Alexander Pope" (1965); and "Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose" (1978). But Wimsatt is best known for his work as a literary theorist. In collaboration with Monroe C. Beardsley, Wimsatt published a collection of essays, "The Verbal Icon", in 1954. One of these essays, "The Intentional Fallacy", maintained that a poem or book was a self-sustaining entity (verbal icon) that deserved to be evaluated on its own terms, regardless of the "man behind the book". This theory represented the height of reaction against romanticism in literary theory, and most especially, the biographical approach to literary criticism. Other works of literary criticism by William Wimsatt include "Literary Criticism, A Shorty History" (1957); "Explication as Criticism: Selected Papers from the English Institute" (1963); and "Day of the Leopards: Essays in Defense of Poems" (1976). Wimsatt also served on the board of editors at Yale in charge of the publication, "Boswell's Journals". He held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and 1947, and a fellowship from the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Advancement of Education in 1953 and 1954. Wimsatt was also a former president of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the executive committee of the Modern Language Association of America, and chairman of the English Institute. In his private life as in his scholarly life Wimsatt exhibited a breadth of interests: he enjoyed playing chess, he was an amateur painter, and he collected Native American artifacts. He died on December 17, 1975 at Yale-New Haven Hospital in New Haven, Connecticut. (Sources: P.M. Thody, "William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr., 1907-1975", Biography Resource Center (Biographical File, Wimsatt Papers 2, Box 4); "William K. Wimsatt, 68, Dead; Yale Expert on 1700's Authors" from the "New York Times" (Biographical File, Wimsatt Papers 2, Box 4))