Quentin Anderson
Quentin Anderson (July 21, 1912 – February 18, 2003) was an American literary critic and cultural historian who taught at Columbia University. He studied at Columbia (BA, 1937) and earned an MA from Harvard and a PhD from Columbia. His work looked at 19th‑century American writers such as Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Walt Whitman, and how they shaped American identity in relation to Europe.
He was born in Minnewaukan, North Dakota, the son of playwright Maxwell Anderson. The family moved to Palo Alto, California, then San Francisco, and finally New York City, where he grew up. During the Great Depression he worked as a mechanic, a grave digger, and a Broadway extra before turning to academia. He joined Columbia, studied under Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling, and became a full professor in 1961. He later held the Julian Clarence Levi Chair and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow. His book The Imperial Self (1971) argued that 19th‑century literature helped define what it means to be American.
He married Thelma Ehrlich in 1947. He had three children: Martha Haskett Anderson from his first marriage, and two sons, Maxwell L. Anderson and Abraham Anderson. He lived on Claremont Avenue in Manhattan and died of heart failure in Morningside Heights at age 90. His grandson is Chase Quentin Anderson.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 06:03 (CET).