[1] Amongst his notable works, many published in The Kenyon Review,[2] are a collaboration with brother Carl Van Doren, American and British Literature since 1890 (1939); critical studies, The Poetry of John Dryden (1920), Shakespeare (1939), The Noble Voice (1945) and Nathaniel Hawthorne (1949); collections of poems including Jonathan Gentry (1931); stories; and the verse play The Last Days of Lincoln (1959).

David Lehman writes that "Though the differences between them were many – Trilling struck some as patrician in demeanor where Van Doren seemed ever the populist – the two great professors inspired a rare filial devotion in generations of Columbia students.

Van Doren published scholarly books on John Dryden and Edwin Arlington Robinson, served as literary editor of The Nation (where he met Dorothy, née Graffe, also a writer) and edited an anthology of world poetry that sold so well it enabled the Van Dorens to buy their house on Bleecker Street in the West Village in New York City in February 1929, just months before the stock market tumbled and the 'roaring' decade ran out.

At a moment when Ivy League prejudice against Jews was not uncommon, Van Doren acquired a reputation for philo-Semitism with an essay he published in 1927 in the Menorah Journal, the magazine that years later would be rechristened Commentary.

The young Trilling possessed 'dignity and grace,' Van Doren wrote, and whatever he elects to do 'will be lovely, for it will be the fruit of a pure intelligence slowly ripened in not too fierce a sun.

'"[3] From 1953-1971 he appeared weekly opposite Maurice Samuel on NBC radio's summer program "Eternal Light: The Words We Live By" where the two discussed the literary and cultural impact of the Bible.

[7] [8] [9] Also among his students were the poets John Berryman and Robert Lax, novelist Anthony Robinson, psychologist Walter B. Pitkin Jr., Japanologist Donald Keene, writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton and chemist Roald Hoffmann.

[6][10] Lehman writes that "His teaching was grounded in the proposition that an intelligent person of good faith needed no special qualifications to read Othello, The Iliad, or The Divine Comedy.

He writes of his of his notable students, who "ranged from ecstatic Zen Beat masters (Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac) to verse sophisticates (Louis Simpson, John Hollander, Richard Howard).

In the film Quiz Show (1994), Mark Van Doren was played by Paul Scofield,[20][21] who earned an Academy Award nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category for his performance.

[10] Mark Van Doren died on December 10, 1972, in Torrington, Connecticut, aged 78, two days after undergoing surgery for circulatory problems at the Charlotte Hungerford Hospital.