Sewall Cushing Strout (April 19, 1923 – November 21, 2013) was an American intellectual historian. He served as the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell University.
Biography
Strout was born in Portland, Maine. He attended Williams College in Massachusetts between 1941 and 1947, with his studies interrupted by service in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. He subsequently earned an MA and a PhD at Harvard University.
He began his academic career teaching at Williams College, Yale University, and the California Institute of Technology before moving to Cornell University in 1962. At Cornell, he was appointed to the Ernest I. White Chair of American Studies and Humane Letters in 1975, a position he held until his retirement in 1989.
Strout was married to Jean Philbrick for 65 years, and the couple had three sons. He died in Ithaca, New York, in November 2013 at the age of 90.
Selected Works
- The Pragmatic Revolt in American History: Carl Becker and Charles Beard (1959)
- The American Image of the Old World (1963)
- Hawthorne in England: Selections from "Our Old Home" and "The English Note-Books" (1965)
- Conscience, Science & Security: The Case of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1965) — editor
- Intellectual History in America (1968) — editor, two volumes
- Divided We Stand: Reflections on the Crisis at Cornell (1970) — co-editor with David I. Grossvogel
- The New Heavens and New Earth: Political Religion in America (1973)
- The Veracious Imagination: Essays on American History, Literature and Biography (1981)
- Making American Tradition: Visions & Revisions from Ben Franklin to Alice Walker (1990)
