# Thomas Herbert Johnson

Thomas Herbert Johnson (April 27, 1902 – January 3, 1985) was an American scholar, teacher, editor, and bibliographer in the field of American literature.
His achievements in letters include: his discovery of the Puritan poet Edward Taylor (c. 1664–1729), whose Poetical Works he issued in 1939; his co-editorship of Literary History of the United States (1948, 3 vols.) of which he compiled the third volume, the Bibliography; and his editions of the writings of Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) which comprise the Poems (1955, 3 vols.) and the Letters (1958, 3 vols.). In 1955, he also published Emily Dickinson: An Interpretative Biography. Prior to Johnson's work, no accurate or complete editions of the writing of this American poet were in existence. In addition, he was the author of The Oxford Companion to American History, 1966.

## Early life

His first semester as a freshman, he failed three of his five courses. 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. He was nineteen.
In the autumn of 1922, he entered Williams College, with the help of President Hopkins, as a freshman. His academic record remained undistinguished until his senior year.
By the time Tom graduated from Williams in 1926, he had been elected to the “Gargoyle” honor society and served as president of the college's theatrical group, “Cap and Bells".
In the year after graduation, 1926–27, Tom joined as a teacher in 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, combined formal education with travel and integrated elite colleges and state schools from across the country, and it was covered nearly weekly by the New York Times. Tom’s letters, thirty-four in all, were addressed to his mother, but were 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).

## Early career

Thomas Johnson completed his M.A. degree at Harvard University in 1929, and earned a Ph.D. in 1934. In 1935 his interest in Colonial Literature can be seen in his Jonathan Edwards: Representative Selections, edited with Clarence Faust of the University of Chicago, followed by The Puritans, authored with Perry Miller of Harvard, in 1938. “But,” as Kermit Vanderbilt wrote in his American Literature and the Academy, “in 1939, he made an impact on American literature studies. He 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.” Johnson’s scholarship was released as The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor in 1939.
Next came the Literary History of the United States, 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. . . .”
As a result of the publication of the Literary History, 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.

## Later career

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."
In 1966, came his last major work, The Oxford Companion to American History, 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."

## As a teacher

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