Thomas Herbert Johnson

Thomas H. Johnson was born in the Connecticut River Valley town of Bradford, Vermont, on 27 April 1902, the middle child of the three children of Herbert Thomas Johnson and Myra Johnson (née Burbeck). His father served as captain during the Spanish–American War and later, when appointed Adjutant General of the State of Vermont, moved his young family to Montpelier. Johnson graduated from Montpelier High School to enter Dartmouth College in 1919.

The future scholar, in his first semester as a freshman, failed three of his five courses.[7] Given a second chance, he took ten courses in the academic year of 1920–21, earning four C’s, three D’s, and three E’s. Johnson wrote President Ernest Martin Hopkins for a third chance and received the reply, “Your letter is a mighty good one and even if it had not been found so unwise to deviate from our policy I should accept your ability to write a letter of this kind as indicating that you could make good in your college course.” But Johnson, who had written President Hopkins, “My greatest, my earliest ambition has been swept away from me because of my own carelessness. . . . only I am to blame,” began teaching at a rural school in Readsboro, Vermont.[8] He was nineteen.

Despite Tom’s temperament, he entered Williams College, with the help of President Hopkins, as a freshman in the autumn of 1922. His academic record remained undistinguished until his senior year when the A’s outran all other grades.

By the time Tom graduated from Williams in 1926, he had been elected to the prestigious “Gargoyle” honor society and served as president of “Cap and Bells,” the college’s theatrical group.

In the year after graduation, 1926–27, Tom joined as a teacher an around–the–world academic cruise for which Howes of Williams was one of three deans. Launched on a large scale, this first experiment in student travel, called the Floating University, included over fifty faculty and four hundred and fifty students, one hundred and twenty of them women. The project, combining formal education with travel, elite colleges and state schools across the country, was covered nearly weekly by the New York Times. Tom’s letters, thirty-four in all, were addressed to his mother, but were clearly meant for his father, his younger brother Edward (“Ned”), headed for a military career, but who was to die tragically of illness in 1927, and his older sister Ruth, married and the mother of twin girls.[9]

Thomas Johnson completed his M.A. degree at Harvard University in 1929, and the Ph.D. in 1934. In 1935 his dedication to Colonial Literature bore fruit in his Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections,[10] edited with Clarence Faust of the University of Chicago, followed by The Puritans,[11] authored with Perry Miller of Harvard, in 1938. “But,” as Kermit Vanderbilt wrote in his American Literature and the Academy, “in 1939, he made a far greater splash in American literature studies. It was he who introduced the scholarly world to the verses of Edward Taylor, four hundred pages of manuscripts that had lain over two centuries in Yale University archives.”[12] Johnson’s scholarship was released as The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor[1] in 1939.

Thomas Johnson reading a newspaper.

By this time Johnson had married Catherine Rice, a Mount Holyoke graduate whom he had met while at Williams, and had begun teaching at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. One of his students at Hackley was Malcolm Forbes, with whom the Johnsons formed a lasting friendship. In 1937 Tom was invited by headmaster Allen Heeley to join the English Department of the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Their daughter Laura Bradley was born on 10 October 1939, followed by a son, Thomas, 4 April 1943. In 1944 Dr. Johnson became chairman of Lawrenceville’s English Department.

When Johnson came to Lawrenceville, he had arranged with Allen Heely that he would have no dormitory or sports responsibilities. Dr. Heely recognized the importance for Lawrenceville of a scholar of this caliber teaching at the secondary level and it was agreed that Johnson would continue his writing and scholarship along with a full teaching schedule.

Next came the Literary History of the United States,[2] published in three volumes by Macmillan in 1948, a collaboration with Robert E. Spiller of the University of Pennsylvania, Willard Thorp of Princeton and Henry Seidel Canby, founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature. Johnson compiled the third volume, the Bibliography. Though as Vanderbilt wrote, “Thomas Johnson was not the foremost bibliographer on the American literature scene when Spiller and Thorp drove down from Princeton to nearby Lawrenceville School in 1942 and persuaded him to join the editorial board in that capacity. But Johnson had more than modest credentials and was, in addition, the foremost scholar of New England literature among all the contributors. He was, in fact, a New Englander. . . .”[12]

As a result of the publication of the Literary History,[2] a landmark in that the volumes made clear that America had a literature, writers who were distinctly American, writing on American themes, American professors were invited to European universities to establish courses in American Literature. For the academic year of 1951–1952, Johnson took his young family to Denmark where, supported by a Guggenheim grant, he set up such courses at the University of Copenhagen.

Johnson was invited by Harvard University Press to work on a new edition of Emily Dickinson. R.W. Franklin, in his introduction to the 1998 Variorum edition, called Johnson’s 1955 edition “a landmark in Dickinson studies. . . . an outstanding achievement . . . essential to Dickinson scholarship for over forty years.”[13]

In 1966 came his last major work, the Oxford Companion to American History,[6] a one-volume reference that Alexander R. Butler, in his review in The New Republic, wrote, “ . . . the book invites browsing,” and continued, “Johnson has set an exceptionally high standard for his possible successors. . . . He has the ability to suggest with a few words a wild variety of historical viewpoints so that the biographies and articles, short though they are, do not emphasize the facts themselves but the interpretations of the facts.”[14]

Thomas Johnson working in his home study in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.

Kermit Vanderbilt pointed out, “ . . . he clearly thrived on the alternation between prep-school instruction and the intense concentration demanded of textual and bibliographical scholarship.”[15]

“But he is first and foremost a teacher,” wrote The Lawrentian in 1967, the year Johnson retired. “Those of us who are fortunate to know him well all know of the pleasure he takes in his writing and his research. . . . but we know better his pleasure in his classes, his talk of boys who do well . . . his concern for the less-gifted, his encyclopedic knowledge of the language and literature he loves to teach.”[16]

Thomas H. Johnson taught at Lawrenceville for thirty years. He held visiting professorships at Rutgers, Harvard, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Williams College. He held honorary degrees from Williams College, Rutgers University, and Marlboro College in Marlboro, Vermont. The Lawrenceville School honored him by the establishment of a teaching chair in his name. He was given the School’s prestigious Masters Award in 2014.

Finding aid for Johnson's papers at the Vermont Historical Society

Collection of Thomas H. Johnson Material at the Lawrenceville School