Biography
Quentin Anderson was born in Minnewaukan, North Dakota. The son of playwright Maxwell Anderson, he moved with his father to Palo Alto, California and then San Francisco after the latter was dismissed from his high school teaching job for his pacifist views. The family then moved to New York City, where Quentin spent his formative years. During the Great Depression, he worked as a mechanic, a grave digger, and as a stage extra on Broadway.
Quentin thereafter began his long career in academia. He studied with Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling at Columbia College, where he earned his B.A. in 1937. After serving in the civilian defense corps in Rockland County, New York, he earned his M.A. at Harvard in 1945 before returning to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1953. He was named a full professor at the university's English Department in 1961 and chaired a disciplinary committee following the protests of 1968. In 1978 he was named the Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities and was granted a senior fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1973-4. From 1979-80 he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center. He died of heart failure in 2003.
He was known as an inspirational conveyor of knowledge during his time as professor at Columbia. His book The Imperial Self (1971) was a widely heralded and debated account of the shaping of American identity as revealed by nineteenth-century American literature.
Anderson lived at 29 Claremont Avenue.
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