Wheelwright, John Brooks (1897-1940)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: John Hay Library 200s
Artist: Damon, Louise Wheelwright ()
Portrait Date:
Medium: Pencil on illustration board
Dimensions: 15 1/2 x 15 1/4
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 221
Brown Historical Property Number: 2290
Poet John Brooks Wheelwright's fusion of modernist aesthetics and Marxist politics formed the core of his active and influential literary and political career throughout the 1920s and 1930s. His poetry appeared in three volumes, Rock and Shell (1933), Mirrors of Venus (1938) and Political Self-Portrait (1940). John Ashberry later named Wheelwright's Collected Poems (1972) in the Sunday New York Times Book Review as one of the hundred most important books of Western literature since the end of World War II. According to John Malcolm Brinnin, had Wheelwright lived long enough to continue his career "he would very likely share rank and status with his close contemporaries Allan Tate, e. e. Cummings, and Hart Crane."
Wheelwright's poetry reflects the influence of his politics, his New England upbringing, and his religious conversion from Unitarian to Anglican. He helped found the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in 1937, just three years before his premature death in 1940 at age forty-three, when he was killed by a drunken driver. Wheelwright was also active in the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, an organization of revolutionary writers in the United States inspired by a manifesto signed by Trotsky, surrealist author Andre Breton, and painter Diego Rivera.
According to Wheelwright scholar Alan M. Wald, by the end of Wheelwright's career, "He blended socialist political activity with poetic creativity to a degree unequaled in American literature."
In 1936, Wheelwright explained to the painter Fairfield Porter, "So far as your career goes, consider it your chief contribution to the causes and no moral conflict will arise. A conflict must have arisen to have painting and socialism present a choice in your mind. Be a socialist painter, as another is a socialist cook, mechanic, lemon picker, or as with Engels, manufacturer."
Wheelwright prepared for college at St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island. He studied at Harvard from 1916-1920, when he was expelled during his senior year for spotty attendance. He was an active member of the Harvard Aesthetes along with such renowned writers as John Dos Passos (1896-1970) and e.e. Cummings (1894-1962). Throughout his literary career he remained active in Boston poets' circles. After leaving Harvard, he studied architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wheelwright, born on September 9, 1897, in Boston, Massachusetts, has been called a "Boston Brahmin." His family genealogy can be traced back to the Bay Colony which banished his American ancestors in the mid 1600s for preaching religious tolerance. His mother, Elizabeth Brooks (Bessie) Wheelwright, a remarkable deaf woman noted for her lip reading skills and aristocratic bearing, was the great-granddaughter of Peter Chardon Brooks, the wealthiest of Boston's colonial "merchant princes," and John Taylor Brooks, one of Massachusetts' first Governors. The mystique of the Brooks family was rendered so vivid to young Wheelwright by his mother that, as a teenager, he went to court to have his middle name changed to Brooks.
Wheelwright's father was the renowned architect Edmund March Wheelwright. Edmund March Wheelwright, the city architect of the City of Boston from 1891 to 1895, was educated in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. His work includes the Harvard Lampoon Building, The Longfellow Bridge, and Jordan Hall. In 1910 he had a mental breakdown and in 1912 committed suicide when John Brooks Wheelwright was a teenager. Following this traumatic experience, John Brooks Wheelwright converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism. Until his differences with official church dogma became too persistent to ignore, Wheelwright even pledged to become a priest. The poems in Political Self-Portrait (1940) contain insights into his gradual abandonment of Christianity aligned with his increased political passions.
In the early morning of September 13 1940, at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street in Boston's Back Bay, Wheelwright died after being struck by a drunk driver. Later, Kenneth Rexroth wrote that "Dead in his prime like so many other American poets, he was not like most of them, already burned out. No one has ever taken the place of this dynamic, inexhaustible and lovable mind and completely original talent."
This famous poet's connection to Brown was the artist of this drawing, his sister Louise Wheelwright Damon. Her husband, John Brooks Wheelwright's brother-in-law, was Professor Samuel Foster Damon (1893-1971) (see BP 220).
Louise Wheelwright Damon (1889-1973) was known both as a painter and as a sculptor. Born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, she is among the few female artists represented in the Brown Portrait Collection. Wheelwright Damon studied with Pauline MacKay, Charles Hawthorne and Philip Hale at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1931 she exhibited at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and later with the Society of Independent Artists. In Rhode Island, Wheelwright Damon was a member of the Providence Art Club and the Newport Art Association.
Her portrait is a pencil drawing on an illustration board and in the lower right corner it says " John Brooks Wheelwright by Louise Wheelwright Damon. " The date of the portrait is unknown.
Wheelwright Damon also painted Brown's portrait of her husband, Professor Samuel Foster Damon (1893-1971) (BP 220). Professor Damon was a distinguished writer, teacher, and scholar in the English Department at Brown. In 1923 Professor Damon along with Robert Hillyer (1895-1961) published Eight More Harvard Poets. One of the eight poets included was John Brooks Wheelwright.