Best Known As: Author - Poetry,  Author

Life Facts:  Ransom was the third of four children of a Methodist minister. His family was highly literate. As a child, he read his family's library and engaged his father in passionate discussions. He wrote many books and poems in his life.

Ransom was home schooled until age ten, and entered Vanderbilt University at fifteen, graduating first in his class in 1909. He interrupted his studies for two years to teach sixth and seventh grades in Taylorsville, Mississippi and Latin and Greek in Lewisburg, Tennessee.

After teaching one more year in Lewisburg, Ransom was selected as a Rhodes Scholar. He attended Oxford University's Christ Church, 1910-13, where he read "Greats", as the course in Greek and Latin classics is called.

After one year teaching Latin in the Hotchkiss School, Ransom was appointed to the English department at Vanderbilt University in 1914. During the First World War, he served as an artillery officer in France. After the war, he returned to Vanderbilt. In 1920, he married Robb Reavill; they raised three children.

In 1937, Ransom accepted a position at Kenyon College in Ohio. He was the founding editor of the Kenyon Review, and continued as editor until his retirement in 1959.

Ransom has few peers among 20th century American university teachers of humanities; his distinguished students include Donald Davidson, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Andrew Lytle, Allen Tate, Peter Taylor, Robie Macauley, Robert Penn Warren, E.L. Doctorow, Cleanth Brooks, and Richard M. Weaver.

Ransom more or less founded the school of literary criticism known as the New Criticism, which gained its name from his 1941 volume of essays The New Criticism. This school, which dominated American literary thought throughout the middle 20th century, emphasized close reading, and criticism based on the texts themselves rather than on extraneous information. Ransom had argued for more "precise and systematic" analysis of texts in a 1937 essay, "[ Criticism, Inc.]" He was critical of several aspects of the movement, however, as well as of poet T. S. Eliot, who became a favorite of other New Critics. Ransom remained an active essayist until his death. A collection of his essays first published in the Kenyon Review was published in 1972. Ransom served as a Senior Fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently as a Senior Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters.

Career Facts:  Ransom more or less founded the school of literary criticism known as the New Criticism, which gained its name from his 1941 volume of essays The New Criticism. This school, which dominated American literary thought throughout the middle 20th century, emphasized close reading, and criticism based on the texts themselves rather than on extraneous information. Ransom had argued for more "precise and systematic" analysis of texts in a 1937 essay, "[ Criticism, Inc.]" He was critical of several aspects of the movement, however, as well as of poet T. S. Eliot, who became a favorite of other New Critics. Ransom remained an active essayist until his death. A collection of his essays first published in the Kenyon Review was published in 1972. Ransom served as a Senior Fellow of the Kenyon School of English and subsequently as a Senior Fellow of the Indiana School of Letters.