and James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound, as well as editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Cold War Literary Cultures, Pressing the Fight: Print, Propaganda, and the Cold War, and the scholarly journal Book History.
Barnhisel applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power is the first page of chapter 5, taking Pearson—who will eventually become a Yale literature professor, a high-ranking spy in World War II, a literary fixer, and a Cold War cultural diplomat—to his first professional position, a summer teaching job at the University of Colorado in Boulder.Learn more about Code Name Puritan at the University of Chicago Press website.
Page 99 is an apt representation of one aspect of the book, as Code Name Puritan is in part a standard biography, and this page continues his life story. However, it’s what I’m calling a “cultural biography,” situating Pearson’s life within a number of ongoing historical developments in which he was enmeshed: the growing recognition of the value of American literature; the birth of “American Studies” as an academic discipline; changing ideas of what the Puritan legacy contributes to the American character; the marriage of universities and the national-security state in the Cold War; and the embrace of experimental modernist literature by elite cultural institutions. I frame Pearson’s life through these developments and they don’t really appear in this short passage.
The test highlights two structural problems that confronted me in writing this book. The first was how to keep readers reading through the early life of a man whom they haven’t heard of, who didn’t end up doing any headline-worthy things, and whose life was quite ordinary. His life only becomes meaningful within these larger contexts, most of which don’t fully coalesce until he is in his thirties. So how to balance the context with creating a vivid portrait of a young man and bringing him to life?
The second was structural. As mundane and ordinary as much of his early life was, his adult life could seem even more monotonous, as he was a Yale professor and very much lived that life. There’s not much of a story arc to an English professor’s life: you teach your classes, you do your research, rinse and repeat annually. Starting in the 1950s Pearson really was doing quite consequential things, but nothing that has a chronological sequence. So the second half of the book jettisons chronology entirely and moves to a thematic structure: the last five chapters all span the same time period (1946-1975), but each focuses on one aspect of his activities. It was a jury-rigged solution to a real conundrum.
--Marshal Zeringue