Norman Holmes Pearson: The ‘Hidden Figure’ Who Rewrote American Literary History

The scholar, literary operator, and spy Norman Holmes Pearson fulfilled almost every role in the communications circuit for a set of modernist poets (many of them women) he wanted to put at the center of American literary history. He edited an important early American literature anthology, helped build the Yale Collection of American Literature, fostered scholarly work on favored writers, and subtly nudged elite American cultural institutions to accept modernism as being truly American. He also served as an editor, literary agent, publicist, executor, research assistant, patron, and even typist for writers such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and above all H.D., enabling them to get their work to the public. In this talk, Barnhisel will describe how through all of these activities Pearson invisibly reshaped critical and public understanding of 20th-century American literature. Greg Barnhisel is professor and chair of English at Duquesne University and author of three books: James Laughlin, New Directions, and the Remaking of Ezra Pound (2005); Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015); and, most recently, Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power (2024).