Carl Clinton Van Doren (1885–1950) was an American critic, biographer, editor, and teacher. He was born in Hope, Illinois, and grew up on a farm near Urbana. He took his bachelor's degree at the University of Illinois in 1907 and his doctorate at Columbia University in 1911, with a dissertation that became his study of Thomas Love Peacock. He was the older brother of the poet and critic Mark Van Doren. Van Doren taught English at Columbia from 1911 until 1930. He was also a leading literary journalist of the period. He was literary editor of The Nation from 1919 to 1922 and then of The Century Magazine until 1925. He helped bring contemporary American writing to a wide readership and argued that American literature deserved serious study in its own right. He co-edited The Cambridge History of American Literature, and later served as editor-in-chief of the Literary Guild. His critical books include The American Novel (1921), Contemporary American Novelists (1922), The Roving Critic (1923), and Many Minds (1924). The Roving Critic collects essays that range across writers and questions in American and English letters. They show the plain, readable style that made him an influential popularizer of literary criticism. In his later career he turned mainly to American history and biography. His Benjamin Franklin (1938) won the Pulitzer Prize for biography. His other later works include the autobiography Three Worlds (1936), Secret History of the American Revolution (1941), and The Great Rehearsal (1948), an account of the making of the Constitution. He died in 1950 in Torrington, Connecticut.
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