The Last Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson in the American Century with Greg Barnhisel

Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/4gFwECF

Norman Holmes Pearson spent almost his entire life at Yale but his impact was felt far from the Old Campus As a student and, eventually, professor, he changed the story of American literature, putting modernist poetry at its center. He was one of the architects of the American Studies program and helped forge the alliance between universities, foundations and professional societies, and the national-security state in the 1950s and 1960s. And in one of his brief sojourns away from New Haven, during World War II he created and headed X-2, the OSS’s counterintelligence branch, and helped design (and recruit for) the Central Intelligence Agency. More locally, through his collecting and brokering of deals Pearson was one of the central figures in building the Yale Collection of American Literature, the heart of the Beinecke Library.

In this talk, Greg Barnhisel will give an overview of Pearson’s unique career as a literary fixer, secret agent, cultural diplomat, and academic bureaucrat. The talk (drawn from his new book CODE NAME PURITAN: NORMAN HOLMES PEARSON AT THE NEXUS OF POETRY, ESPIONAGE, AND AMERICAN POWER) will focus especially on how Yale shaped Pearson and, later, how Pearson contributed to shaping a new Yale in the postwar period.

Greg Barnhisel is Professor of English at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of JAMES LAUGHLIN, NEW DIRECTIONS, AND THE REMAKING OF EZRA POUND (2005), COLD WAR MODERNISTS: ART, LITERATURE, AND AMERICAN CULTURAL DIPLOMACY (2015), and CODE NAME PURITAN: NORMAN HOLMES PEARSON AT THE NEXUS OF POETRY, ESPIONAGE, AND AMERICAN POWER (2024), all of which drew heavily on materials in the Beinecke’s collections.

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and Q & A beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.