ABSTRACT
When the University of Washington newspaper, the Daily, carried the Pulitzer story, it quoted from a revealing interview with Vernon Louis Parrington. The Daily also announced that Parrington had received job offers from the universities of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan as a result of “the fame which the book has brought to him". Genteel culture came knocking at his door in 1929, when Kenneth Murdock sent his personal lawyer to research whether Parrington was eligible for membership in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. The first number of American Literature appeared in March 1929, carrying Parrington’s review of Albert J. Beveridge’s biography of Abraham Lincoln. The dean of the Graduate School, Frederick Morgan Padelford, Parrington’s longtime colleague in the English Department, reviewed the chapbook in the December 1929 issue of the alumni magazine and praised Harrison for his portrayal. Parrington welcomed the development of realism as a democratizing force in the realms of both politics and culture.
