Quentin Anderson, 90; Literary Critic, Cultural Historian, Professor

Quentin Anderson, 90, a literary critic and cultural historian who taught at Columbia University from 1939 until 1981, died Feb. 18 in his New York City home of unspecified causes.

Born in Minnewaukan, N.D., the son of playwright and author Maxwell Anderson, he worked briefly in theater before earning bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia and a master’s from Harvard.

He was considered an expert on such 19th century American writers as Henry James, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, and wrote widely for such scholarly publications as Partisan Review, Daedalus, American Scholar and Commentary.

Anderson was best-known for his 1957 book “The American Henry James,” a critique of the novelist’s body of work; and for his 1971 book “The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History.”

“The Imperial Self,” perhaps oddly, grew out of his experience as disciplinary committee chairman after a 1968 student revolt at Columbia. A Boston Globe reviewer wrote: “Anderson’s book was an unusually strongly felt, deeply grounded but oblique attack on the radicals.... But it wasn’t just the rads at whom he was angry; it was the starry-eyed visionaries of all sorts.”

After his retirement, Anderson published his 1992 book “Making Americans: An Essay on Individualism and Money.”

Anderson was viewed as an expert on the very American nature of American literature, including its lines of descent from earlier European writing.