Fred Lewis Pattee papers

Fred Lewis Pattee was an author, poet, scholar, teacher, and leading authority on American literature. He was born March 22, 1863, on Pattee Hill, near Bristol, New Hampshire, the son of Lewis Franklin and Mary Philbrick Ingalls Pattee. Anna Laura Plumer became his wife in 1889 and died in 1927. They had one daughter, Sarah. In 1928, he married Grace Garee, who died in 1946. His childhood was spent on the family farm, and he attended elementary schools in Bristol and South Alexandria. He worked as a farm boy and printer's devil in a printing shop, and it was here that he began to dream of writing. He completed New Hampton Institution's college preparatory course in 1883. Pattee matriculated at Dartmouth College in 1884, his studies interrupted by the periodic need to earn money as a writer or teacher, but he graduated in 1888. Pattee received his Master of Arts degree from Dartmouth in 1891.

In 1889, Pattee was hired as a high school principal in Mendon, Massachusetts, for a year. For the next four years he was the principal of Coe's Northwood Academy where he and his wife taught.

Pattee accepted a position in September 1894 as Professor of English and Rhetoric at the Pennsylvania State College, and in 1918 was appointed Professor of American Literature; he probably was the first professor in the country to hold a title in American literature. While at Penn State, Pattee took an interest in many activities. In 1895, he was a charter member of the Literary Club and in 1897 was one of two founders of the Penn State Thespians, a student dramatic group. In 1901, he deplored the fact that Penn State had no college song, so he penned the lyrics for "Alma Mater." The song won the immediate approval of the students and was used for the first time at the 1901 commencement exercises. Pattee served as acting chaplain of the college and played an important role in the religious life on campus. He also taught a Sunday school class in the Methodist Church. Pattee played an important part in expanding the college library from only one novel in 1894, to hundreds of novels by the time he retired. In 1941, he presented his library of two thousand volumes of American literature to Penn State at the ceremonies dedicating the new library building. The library contained one of the best collections of reference material on early American literature in the country, including nearly all the anthologies of American literature published between 1800 and 1850, and first editions of a number of notable early American writers.

The author of many books and magazine articles, Pattee's literary output was varied. He published his first book, Literature in the Public Schools, in 1891. His first published verse collection was The Wine of May in 1893, and a second and final collection, Beyond the Sunset, appeared in 1934. Turning to fiction in the early 1900s, he published three novels: Mary Garvin, The House of the Black Ring, and a college novel, The Breaking Point. Out of his chapel talks came a book, Compelled Men, and from his experience as a Sunday school teacher grew Elements of Religious Pedagogy.

A History of American Literature, one of the first college textbooks on the subject, was rejected in 1894, but appeared after several rewritings in 1896 and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Of all his books, American Literature Since 1870 created the greatest furor because of the emphasis on writers outside of New England, and many of the writers included were still alive when the book appeared in 1915. This publication, combined with two later volumes, The New American Literature (1930) and The First Century of American Literature (1935), constituted probably the fullest history of American literature written by one person.

In 1919, Pattee's large anthology for college students, Century Readings in American Literature, set a standard pattern for later college anthologies. Two additional volumes deal with special phases of the literature, The Development of the American Short Story, and The Feminine Fifties. Two collections of essays, Sidelights on American Literature and Tradition and Jazz, deal with the modern writers of the time. In his editorial work, his most scholarly product is the three-volume set, Poems of Philip Freneau, published between 1902 and 1909. He also edited John Neal's essays, American Writers, James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, and C.B. Brown's novel Wieland.

Pattee's poems, short stories, essays, and book reviews have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, such as The Atlantic Monthly, Mencken's American Mercury, and The Nation. He wrote the article on the American short story in the 1928 Encyclopedia Britannica. As one of the five "charter" editors of the learned quarterly, American Literature and a frequent contributor, he continued his influence on scholarly studies.

Pattee retired from the Penn State faculty with emeritus rank in 1928. After leaving Penn State, Pattee moved to Florida. He later accepted a position as Professor of American Literature at Rollins College, a post he held until 1941. He was a visiting professor at the University of Illinois from 1923-1924. During the summers of 1924, 1925, and 1928-1936, he served as Professor of American Literature at the Bread Loaf Summer School of English in Middlebury, Vermont. In 1948, he completed his autobiography, My World as in My Time. This work was published posthumously as Penn State Yankee: Autobiography of Fred Lewis Pattee (The Pennsylvania State College, 1953).

In 1947, under the increasing weight of illness, Pattee made his last trip to Penn State. He died May 6, 1950, at the age of eighty-seven. In September 1950, Penn State designated the library the Fred Lewis Pattee Library.