Thomas Herbert Johnson

Not to be confused with Herbert Thomas Johnson.
Thomas H. Johnson
Born(1902-04-27)April 27, 1902
Bradford, Vermont
DiedJanuary 3, 1985(1985-01-03) (aged 82)
Known forEdward Taylor: Poetical Works, Literary History of the United States, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography, The Oxford Companion to American History
SpouseCatherine Rice
ChildrenLaura Johnson Waterman, Thomas Johnson
Parent(s)Herbert Thomas Johnson, Myra Johnson
AwardsThe Lawrenceville School Masters Award
Academic background
EducationMontpelier High School, Dartmouth College, Williams College, Harvard University
Academic work
DisciplineAmerican Literature
Sub-disciplinePuritan Scholar, Emily Dickinson

Thomas Herbert Johnson (April 27, 1902 – January 3, 1985) was an American scholar, teacher, editor, and bibliographer in the field of American literature.[citation needed]

His work includes the discovery of the Puritan poet Edward Taylor (c. 1664–1729), whose Poetical Works[1] he issued in 1939; his co-editorship of Literary History of the United States[2] (1948, 3 vols.) of which he compiled the third volume, the Bibliography; and his editions of the writings of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) which comprise the Poems[3] (1955, 3 vols.) and the Letters[4] (1958, 3 vols.). In 1955, he also published Emily Dickinson: An Interpretative Biography.[5] Prior to Johnson's work, complete editions of Dickinson's writing did not exist.[citation needed] In addition, he was the author of The Oxford Companion to American History (1966).[6]

Early life

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During his first semester as a freshman, he failed three of his five courses.[7] Given a second chance, he took ten courses in the academic year of 1920–21, earning four C’s, three D’s, and three E’s. Johnson wrote President Ernest Martin Hopkins requesting another chance. Hopkins responded that, despite finding Johnson's letter compelling, he would not deviate from the school's policy. Johnson, wrote to Hopkins, “My greatest, my earliest ambition has been swept away from me because of my own carelessness... only I am to blame.” Johnson began teaching at a rural school in Readsboro, Vermont at age 19.[8]

In the autumn of 1922, he entered Williams College, with the help of President Hopkins, as a freshman. His academic record remained undistinguished until his senior year.[9] By the time Johnson graduated from Williams in 1926, he had been elected to the “Gargoyle” honor society and served as president of the college's theatrical group, “Cap and Bells".[10][11]

In the year after graduation, 1926–27, Johnson joined as a teacher in an around–the–world academic cruise for which Howes of Williams was one of three deans. Known as the Floating University, it included over fifty faculty members and four hundred and fifty students (one hundred and twenty of them women). The project combined formal education with travel, integrating elite colleges and state schools from across the country, and it was covered nearly weekly by the New York Times. Johnson’s letters, thirty-four in all, were addressed to his mother, but were meant for his father, his younger brother Edward (“Ned”), and his older sister Ruth.[12]

Early career

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Thomas Johnson completed his M.A. degree at Harvard University in 1929 and earned a Ph.D. in 1934. He wrote on colonial literature in Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections,[13] edited with Clarence Faust of the University of Chicago, followed by The Puritans,[14] authored with Perry Miller of Harvard, in 1938. According to Kermit Vanderbilt in his American Literature and the Academy, Johnson "made an impact on American literature studies" in 1939, introducing "the scholarly world to the verses of Edward Taylor, four hundred pages of manuscripts that had lain over two centuries in Yale University archives.”[15] Johnson’s scholarship was released as The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor[1] in 1939.

Thomas Johnson reading a newspaper.

He then contributed Literary History of the United States,[2] published in three volumes by Macmillan in 1948, a collaboration with Robert E. Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania, Willard Thorp of Princeton and Henry Seidel Canby, founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. Johnson compiled the third volume, the Bibliography. Vanderbilt wrote that although “Thomas Johnson was not the foremost bibliographer on the American literature scene when Spiller and Thorp drove down from Princeton to nearby Lawrenceville School in 1942 and persuaded him to join the editorial board in that capacity," Johnson "had more than modest credentials and was, in addition, the foremost scholar of New England literature among all the contributors. He was, in fact, a New Englander. . . .”[15]

The publication of the Literary History[2] helped establish that America had its own literature, with writers who were distinctly American that wrote on American themes. American professors were subsequently invited to European universities to establish courses in American Literature.

Later career

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Johnson was invited by Harvard University Press to work on a new edition of Emily Dickinson. R. W. Franklin, in his introduction to the 1998 Variorum edition, described Johnson’s 1955 edition as "a landmark in Dickinson studies [...] an outstanding achievement [...] essential to Dickinson scholarship for over forty years."[16]

In 1966, his last major work, The Oxford Companion to American History,[6] was published. Alexander R. Butler, in his review in The New Republic, wrote that "the book invites browsing" and that "Johnson has set an exceptionally high standard for his possible successors. [...] He has the ability to suggest with a few words a wild variety of historical viewpoints so that the biographies and articles, short though they are, do not emphasize the facts themselves but the interpretations of the facts."[17]

Johnson working in his home study in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

Johnson retired in 1967. That year, The Lawrentian wrote of him, "But he is first and foremost a teacher [...] Those of us who are fortunate to know him well all know of the pleasure he takes in his writing and his research. [...] but we know better his pleasure in his classes, his talk of boys who do well [...] his concern for the less-gifted, his encyclopedic knowledge of the language and literature he loves to teach."[18] Vanderbilt characterized Johnson as having "clearly thrived on the alternation between prep-school instruction and the intense concentration demanded of textual and bibliographical scholarship."[19]

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References

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  1. ^ a b Taylor, Edward (1939). Johnson, Thomas (ed.). The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor. New York, NY: Rockland Editions.
  2. ^ a b c Johnson, Thomas; Spiller, Robert; Thorp, Willard; Seidel Canby, Henry, eds. (1948). Literary History of the United States. New York, NY: The Macmillan Company.
  3. ^ Dickinson, Emily (1955). Johnson, Thomas (ed.). The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  4. ^ Dickinson, Emily (1958). Johnson, Thomas; Ward, Theodora (eds.). The Letters of Emily Dickinson. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
  5. ^ Johnson, Thomas (1967). Emily Dickinson: An Interpretive Biography. New York, NY: Atheneum.
  6. ^ a b Johnson, Thomas (1966). The Oxford Companion to American History. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
  7. ^ Material pertaining to Thomas H. Johnson’s time at Dartmouth College is in the collections of the Bunn Library at the Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, N.J.
  8. ^ Thomas Johnson’s diary for the year he taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Readsboro, VT., is in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society.
  9. ^ https://archivesspace.williams.edu/repositories/2/resources/401
  10. ^ Ockman, Caleb. "The Gargoyles: The College's century-old, somewhat-secret society". The Williams Record. Retrieved February 18, 2025.
  11. ^ "Cap and Bells". Special Collections. Retrieved February 18, 2025.
  12. ^ The letters Thomas Johnson wrote his family during this around-the-world trip are in the collections of the Vermont Historical Society. See also Laura Johnson Waterman’s, “Writing Home from Around the World, 1926-1927,” Vermont History, Vol. 76, No. 2, Summer/Fall 2008.
  13. ^ Edwards, Jonathan (1935). Johnson, Thomas; Faust, Clarence (eds.). Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections. New York, NY: American Writers Series.
  14. ^ Johnson, Thomas; Miller, Perry (1938). The Puritans. New York, NY: American Book Company.
  15. ^ a b Vanderbilt, Kermit, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA., 1986, p. 443.
  16. ^ R. W. Franklin, editor, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Variorum edition, Cambridge Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
  17. ^ Butler, Alexander R., “History from Abbe to Zworykin,” The New Republic, 15 October 1966, p. 22.
  18. ^ "Teacher-Scholar: Thomas H. Johnson, Ph.D.," The Lawrentian, Winter 1967, pp. 14-15.
  19. ^ Vanderbilt, p. 444.
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