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Frank's bookshelves bulge with a special set of 64 volumes by authors with the same patronymic: Van Doren. Brother Carl, who died in 1950, started the set in 1911 with a scholarly biography of British Novelist and Poet Thomas Love Peacock. Five years later, while still a graduate student at Columbia, Mark followed with a study of American Naturalist Henry Thoreau. Close friends as well as brothers, Carl and Mark then proceeded to found a family tradition of literary excellence based on incisive, forthright thinking and sturdy independence. Carl, a big, vigorous man who was devoted to football until he stumbled on the works of Christopher Marlowe, concentrated on literary criticism and history. His thoughtful, conscientious works include The Great Rehearsal, a vivid narrative of the Philadelphia convention that drafted the U.S. Constitution, and, at the top of his achievement, the biography of Benjamin Franklin that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Like his nephew, Carl Van Doren had an encyclopedic mind. Wrote Novelist Sinclair Lewis: "He could have sat down with Erasmus; but they would have discussed football or girls or the vintage of their wine as vigorously as the latest stirring discoveries in Finnish philology."
Mark, nine years younger, wrote volumes of criticism too, but he also had the spirit of the poet.
Listen. The wind is still,
And far away in the night—
See! The uplands fill
With a running light.
So began Spring Thunder, the first of the coolly intellectual Mark Van Doren verses that now fill a dozen volumes. One volume, Collected Poems, won him the Pulitzer Prize a year after Carl. His Nathaniel Hawthorne did for one of the nation's literary founding fathers what brother Carl did for Benjamin Franklin. Perhaps Mark Van Doren's most lasting achievement has been fashioned in the classrooms of Columbia; he ranks among the great U.S. teachers. One former student, Trappist Father Thomas (The Seven Storey Mountain) Merton, wrote of him: "His classes were literally 'education'—they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas."
Together Carl and Mark were editors of The Nation, and both married girls who could write or edit as well as cook. Irita Van Doren, Carl's first wife, has edited book reviews for the New York Herald Tribune since 1926. Novelist and Editor Dorothy Graffe Van Doren, Mark's wife, wrote and produced broadcasts for the OWI during World War II. The prodigious output of this closely knit quartet soon earned it the nickname of "the Van Doren trust."
Since the end of World War II, the Van Doren trust has grown bigger yet as the children of the five Van Doren brothers, nine in all, came of age and began to produce children of their own—17 of them so far.