Van Wyck Brooks

[1] Brooks's best-known work is a series of studies entitled Makers and Finders (five volumes, 1936–1952), which chronicled the development of American literature during the long 19th century.

For The Flowering of New England, 1815–1865 (1936) he won the second National Book Award for Non-Fiction from the American Booksellers Association[2][3] and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History.

Although a decade-long fund-raising effort was abandoned in 1972, a hermit in Los Angeles, Charles E. Piggott, with no connection to Bridgewater surprised the town by leaving money for the library in his will.

His influential 1918 essay "On Creating a Usable Past" argued that the United States lacked its own coherent cultural arts tradition.

[10] The Van Wyck Brooks Historic District, known for its old Victorian and Second French Empire style buildings in Plainfield, the town of his birth, is named after him.