How did Van Wyck Brooks criticize American culture in America’s Coming-of-Age?

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literary criticism George Gascoigne, woodcut, 1576.

In his seminal work America’s Coming-of-Age (1915), Van Wyck Brooks critiqued American culture by identifying a fundamental duality rooted in the nation's Puritan heritage. He argued that this historical legacy created a rigid separation between spiritual life and material, money-oriented concerns.

According to Brooks, this internal conflict manifested in contemporary society as a damaging split between two distinct publics:

Highbrow: A sphere characterized by abstract, detached, and overly academic intellectualism.
Lowbrow: A sphere defined by crass, commercial, and purely utilitarian interests.

Brooks contended that this polarization was detrimental to the development of a mature national literature, as neither extreme provided a healthy or integrated environment for the American writer. He believed this cultural fragmentation prevented the country from achieving a cohesive identity, effectively stalling its "coming-of-age" as a civilization.1