Life
Born in Chicago, Wagenknecht grew up and went to school in Oak Park, Illinois. He was attracted from an early age to various art forms: theater, opera, movies, and the Oz novels of L. Frank Baum. He was particularly interested in the writings of critic Gamaliel Bradford, who immersed himself in the life and works of an author and then wrote what he called a "psychography" about the writer.
Wagenknecht received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1932. His doctoral dissertation was a Bradford-like psychograph, Charles Dickens: A Victorian Portrait. In the same year when he was awarded his Ph.D., Wagenknecht married Dorothy Arnold; the couple had three sons.
Wagenknecht spent a long career teaching at a number of schools: University of Chicago (1923–25), University of Washington (1925–1943), Illinois Institute of Technology (1943–1947), Boston University (1947–1965), and the extension division of Harvard University (1965–1972). His style of teaching was rigorous and traditional, and he challenged his students with tough examinations.
Throughout his teaching career and beyond, Wagenknecht wrote on his great loves of literature and film. Perhaps his best known books are Calvacade of the English Novel (1943, second edition 1954) and Calvacade of the American Novel (1952). A thinker of broad range, Wagenknecht wrote or edited books on Henry James, Marilyn Monroe, Lillian Gish, John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, Jenny Lind, and Theodore Roosevelt. His first publication appeared in 1927; his last in 1994. He even wrote novels (under the pseudonym Julian Forrest) about Joan of Arc and Mary, Queen of Scots. The list of his books includes more than sixty titles.
After his retirement from teaching, Wagenknecht stayed active as a writer into his nineties. A review of one of his books described him as a Jamesian hero, which is appropriate because he wrote three books on Henry James and personified the intelligence, perception and decency that James prized.
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