ABSTRACT

The Vernon Louis Parrington family arrived in Seattle on Labor Day of 1908. Seattle provided a much needed retreat as well as the setting in which Parrington’s American studies would rapidly advance and produce pedagogical and professional growth. After Norman, Seattle provided a dynamic intellectual, social, economic, and political milieu. Although J. Allen Smith provided the primary intellectual and personal model for Parrington during the early years of his Washington tenure, he was only one influence among many on the faculty and, indeed, in the larger community. During his first winter in Washington, Parrington wrote his last known poem, an ode to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Parrington’s growing radicalism in political and social thinking did not go entirely unnoticed either in the English Department or on the campus at large. Yet there is very little substantiated evidence of his political opinions, outside of his new book manuscript, until he began publishing book reviews on such topics in the early 1920s.