Henry S. Canby

The decade of the 1920s was, perhaps, the greatest, certainly the most articulate and prolific span in the history of American literature. In it, the nation, for the first time, became fully conscious of itself; fully aware of its peculiar culture—separate and unique. It was the sudden energetic expression, in creative writing, of this awareness, that confirmed Henry Canby’s lifelong conviction about our great indigenous potential in both the substance and the method of writing. In the 1920s, the change from the earlier borrowing and imitation, the presentation of foreign scenes or trans planted manners that had characterized so much of our earlier literature struck him like a fresh west wind and he became, in the editorial chair he had just acquired, one of its leading champions and critics.

The chair was in the offices of a new literary magazine; one that had arrived, fortuitously, parallel with the trend. The Saturday Review of Literature had emerged from a literary supplement to the New York Evening Post which when the Post went down in financial defeat the group of its editors had salvaged and, with the aid of an angel or two, had turned into an independent magazine serving the cause of American literature as it had never before been served. The group included William Rose Benét, Christopher Morley, and Amy Loveman; but Henry was the mastermind and through his administrative ability plus his wide acquaintance among American writers and his familiarity with the best writing brought the Review abreast of its stirring times.

Apart from his work on the Evening Post, Henry had a rich background for his task. As a teacher at Yale, he followed along in the Billy Phelps tradition—enthusiastic, tolerant, popular. Primarily he was a teacher rather than a scholar; his impulse was always to impart what he learned from his reading rather than to cherish it as acquired knowledge. To him criticism could be, and the best of it was, creative: this he practiced in his teaching, his writing, and his editing.

“Perhaps,” wrote Centurion Allan Nevins in appraising Henry’s work on the Review, “he did not have the passion for research and synthesis that marks the born historian; perhaps he lacked the intellectual subtlety of a More. But he did have the gifts of an admirable editor, and the thoroughness with which he had steeped himself in the intellectual past of the country gave him an indispensable part of his editorial equipment.”

Henry Canby was born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1878. His ancestry was Quaker, and Henry got his first education in a Quaker school. He graduated from Yale in 1899 having earned in three years a degree as bachelor of philosophy. Six years later, he won his doctorate and afterwards not only taught but organized methods of teaching in English at Yale. In the First World War, he served in the British Committee of War Information.

From 1924 to 1936, he edited the Saturday Review of Literature and thereafter served as chairman of its editorial board. Meanwhile, however, he became editor-in-chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Purists among his colleagues thought it a pity that he thus allied himself with a commercial venture, but in fact he was admirably adapted to the post. He had a flair for the popular in writing as well as sound judgment of literary values. Here again, he felt that he was teaching, educating the American people in the best American books; raising, in the country, the level of culture. In the Book-of-the-Month, he not only exerted important influence on its selections but he also picked its editorial staff. The selections of the club under his aegis were happily received by its large membership, but they were never the choices a pedant would have made.

In the Second World War, he went overseas for the United States Office of War Information. After the war, he was associated with Allan Nevins in promoting the idea of a popular magazine of history—spadework which came to fruition with the publication of American Heritage. He collaborated, also, in a three-volume Literary History of the United States. Before this, he had produced some seven critical or bio graphical books including an autobiography.

With all his gifts, Henry Canby was simple in his manner and talk, wholly unassuming, kind, friendly, above all an extrovert. He gave far more than he took, he was eager to help any deserving beginner in writing or scholarship.

He was devoted to the Century and was with us much. In the last years of his life, when a long, progressive illness kept him away, he was sadly missed. His membership lasted for nearly forty years.

Roger Burlingame
1962 Century Association Yearbook