Papers of Howard Mumford Jones

Howard Mumford Jones (1892-1980), a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian of American culture, was the Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Jones taught English, American, and comparative literature.

Jones graduated from the University of Wisconsin (1914) and received a master's degree from the University of Chicago (1915). Before joining the Harvard faculty, Jones taught at several universities: he was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas (1916-1917), assistant professor, Montana State University (1917-1919); associate professor and department head at the University of Texas (1919-1924); associate professor and then professor, University of North Carolina (1925-1930), and professor, University of Michigan (1930-1936). In 1936 Jones received an honorary doctoral degree from Harvard and joined its faculty as a professor of English, retiring in 1962. Jones was also dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1943-1944) and editor-in-chief of the John Harvard Library, a series of books published by the Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press (1958 to 1962). After retiring from Harvard, Jones served as a Jefferson lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley and became editor of the Harvard Library Bulletin (1966). In 1975 he lectured at the University of Arkansas. Jones published more than thirty books on poetry, plays, biographies, and intellectual history ranging from scholarly treatises on Irish literature, Lord Byron, French and German culture, and American literary history. In 1965, Jones won the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction for his history of the formative years of American culture, O Strange New World. In 1975, Jones published his autobiography, which recounted his work in the humanities.

In 1918, Jones married Clara McLure. They had one child before they divorced in 1925. In 1927, Jones married Bessie Judith Zaban; they had no children.