Irving Babbitt

Irving Babbitt (1865-1933), American critic and educator, born in Dayton, Ohio, and educated at Harvard University and in Paris. Babbitt was appointed professor of French literature at Harvard in 1912. Through his books and articles he became known as one of the leaders of the new humanism in literature. In the 1920s the intellectually conservative new humanists reacted against naturalism and its tenets of biological and economic determinism. Instead, the new humanists reemphasized the power of human will and attempted to restore traditional cultural values concerned with the unique place of human beings in the natural world. Babbitt's books include Literature and the American College (1908), The New Laokoön (1910), Masters of Modern French Criticism (1912), Rousseau and Romanticism (1919), and On Being Creative (1932).