Howard Mumford Jones (April 16, 1892 – May 11, 1980) was a U.S. writer, literary critic, and professor of English at Harvard University.
Jones was the book editor for The Boston Evening Transcript.
Howard Jones was born in Saginaw, Michigan. Before going to Harvard, Jones was a member of the English faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. In 1925, while there, he approached the president of the university, Harry Woodburn Chase, lamenting the absence of a bookstore in the town of Chapel Hill, and offered to open one in his office. This eventually became the Bull's Head Bookshop, now located in Student Stores.
In February, 1954 Mr. Jones gave the dedicatory address at the opening of the addition to the University of Wisconsin Library, entitled: "Books and the Independent Mind." The Crux of his comments was perhaps contained in his midpoint comment: "While it is true that we in this nation remain free to be idiotic, it does not necessarily follow, that we must be idiotic, in order to be free!" In 1965 he won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for O Strange New World: American Culture-The Formative Years. He also authored Belief and Disbelief in American Literature (1967) and The Age of Energy (1971), and many scholarly journal articles.
The Howard Mumford Jones Professorship of American Studies in the Department of History, Harvard University, was named in his honor.
Among Jones' students at Harvard was Betty Miller Unterberger, later the first woman professor at Texas A&M University and the first woman president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Jones had much impact on Unterberger, having introduced her to the technical advantages of having a dictaphone in her historical writing. He had also urged her to marry Robert Unterberger, who is a retired professor of geophysics at TAMU.
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