American Academy of Arts and Letters - Membership

Membership

Members of the Academy are chosen for life and have included some of the leading figures in the American art scene. They are organized into committees that award annual prizes to help up-and-coming artists. Although the names of some of the members of this organization may not be well known today, each of these men were well known in their own time. Greatness and pettiness are demonstrable among the Academy members, even during the first decade during which William James declined his nomination on the grounds that his little brother Henry had been elected first. One of the giants of the academy in his time, Robert Underwood Johnson, casts a decades-long shadow in his one-man war against encroaching modernism, blackballing such writers as H. L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T. S. Eliot (before his emigration to England disqualified him for full membership). The former President of Harvard, Charles W. Eliot declined election to the Academy "because he was already in so many societies that he didn't want to add to the number."

Although never explicitly excluded, women were simply not elected to membership in the early years. The admission of Julia Ward Howe in 1907 (at the age of 86) as the first woman in the Academy was only one incident in the intense debate about the very consideration of female members. In 1926, the election of four women – Edith Wharton, Margaret Deland, Agnes Repplier and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman – was said to have "marked the letting down of the bars to women."

Below is a partial list of past members of the National Institute and Academy of Arts & Letters: