Bergen Evans

Widely known as an author, teacher, and lexicographer, BERGAN EVANS is on the faculty of Northwestern University,

BERGEN EVANS, professor of English at Northwestern University, is known to a wide television and radio audience as one of our liveliest lexicographers and literary controversialists. He takes up, in the article that follows, the defense of WEBSTER’S THIRD NEW INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY,which was assailed by Wilson Eollett in the January ATLANTIC.

Professor of English at Northwestern University, BERGEN EVANS has made a reputation for himself as a linguistic expert, in his program, THE LAST WORD, and in his book, ADICTIONARY OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN USAGE,which he compiled with the assistance of his sister, Cornelia. Last month the ATLANTIC published Wilson Follett’s stricture on current American usage, “ Grammar Is Obsolete.”Mr. Evans takes the more optimistic view.

BERGEN EVANS has written several Atlantic articles in recent years, and parts of his book, The Natural History of Nonsense, appeared in onr pages.

Ohio born and bred, BERGEN EVANSis today Professor of English at Northwestern University and the author of that devastating and entertaining book, The Natural History of Nonsense. But when he was studying at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930, Mr. Evans eked out his meager funds by serving during the summer months as a courier for a hit-and-run tourist agency which lacked the kindliness and experience of Cook or American Express but which certainly operated on the accepted American principle of the more speed the more service.

In the days of Victoria, novelists wrote their great love scenes with the closed-door technique. The lovers met in a tower, a barn, or a bedroom, and for seven chapters thereafter the reader was kept guessing. But at the turn of the century the door to the boudoir began to open and now it is off its hinges. What a difference this makes to our best-sellers and to the women who read them has been wittily discerned by BERGEN EVANS,Professor of English at Northwestern University and the author of that shrewd blast of all follies, The Natural History of Nonsense.