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Code Name Puritan

Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power

Code Name Puritan

Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power

An insightful biography of an unassuming literary scholar—and spy—who transformed postwar American culture.

Although his impact on twentieth-century American cultural life was profound, few people know the story of Norman Holmes Pearson. Pearson’s life embodied the Cold War alliances among US artists, scholars, and the national-security state that coalesced after World War II. As a Yale professor and editor, he helped legitimize the study of American culture and shaped the public’s understanding of literary modernism—significantly, the work of women poets such as Hilda Doolittle and Gertrude Stein. At the same time, as a spy, recruiter, and cultural diplomat, he connected the academy, the State Department, and even the CIA.

In Code Name Puritan, Greg Barnhisel maps Pearson’s life, from his childhood injury that led to a visible, permanent disability to his wartime counterespionage work neutralizing the Nazis’ spy network to his powerful role in the cultural and political heyday sometimes called the American Century. Written with clarity and informed by meticulous research, Barnhisel’s revelatory portrait of Pearson details how his unique experiences shaped his beliefs about the American character, from the Puritans onward.

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Biography and Letters

History: American History

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

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Reviews

"Charismatic Yale professor and OSS spymaster, Norman Holmes Pearson was so good a secret agent that he left few visible traces on his time. But he was a master of soft power, an 'odd man out who was deeply in,' and his fingerprints are everywhere: on the shaping of the modernist canon, the disciplinary origins of American Studies, and even the founding of the CIA. Greg Barnhisel’s Code Name Puritan shows how it all worked, a finely detailed and provocative account of a life at the center of the American establishment."

Michael Gorra, author of 'The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War'

"Illuminating study of an important literary light long forgotten."

Kirkus Reviews

"Despite the loving care he lavishes on Pearson in this engaging book, Mr. Barnhisel’s subject plays something of a supporting role in his era, never quite becoming, as the author suggests, 'the emblematic figure of the truncated American Century.' Pearson remains a major minor figure. And that is probably how this old Puritan—and spook—would have wanted it."

Max Norman | The Wall Street Journal

"Norman Pearson was a Yale professor, counterintelligence agent, and Cold Warrior who used literature and diplomacy to fight fascism and communism. Posing as a frail book collector while working for the early CIA, he forged relationships with William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, H.D., Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Muriel Rukeyser, Marianne Moore, and W. H. Auden as he helped build America’s espionage agencies from the ground up. Pearson’s covert work rendered his influence on American culture all but invisible. Now, Greg Barnhisel has rescued Pearson from history’s shadows in this fascinating chronicle of a scholar, spy, and key architect of the American century."

Heather Clark, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of 'Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath'

"The Professor of Espionage came disguised as a genteel literary critic from Yale. Not only did Norman Holmes Pearson cultivate the modernist canon of English poetry for academia and the American public. He also tutored the founding generation of the CIA in the black arts of covert action, hob-nobbed with the barons of British intelligence, and midwifed the birth of a new academic discipline, American Studies. In Code Name Puritan, this most improbable and influential of Cold War scholar/spies comes to life as a man, a friend, and a historical force."

Jefferson Morley, author of 'The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton'

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Born a Puritan
2. Bright College Years
3. The Cream of American Intellectuality
4. Big Shots
5. Heady Society
6. The Puritan Goes to War
7. The Hot Property
8. Grampaw and the Commahunter
9. The Networker
10. An Intellectual Ménage à Trois
11. American Studies and the American Century
12. Odd Man In
Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index