Greg Barnhisel, <i>Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power</i>

In this biography, Greg Barnhisel sets out to show how Norman Holmes Pearson, the Yale English professor (and one-time agent for the OSS, precursor to the CIA), is "unique because he brought together the two rarefied worlds in which he moved (academe and national security)" and "how this produced a new relationship between the government and its universities and foundations and the publishing industry, and how it changed our understanding of modern American literature" (1).The book is deeply researched and it presents a clear (and clear-eyed) account of Pearson's life and work.Because much of that work, after his experience during the Second World War, took place in New Haven seminar rooms and libraries, Barnhisel innovates on biographical structure, presenting Pearson's life in typical chronological fashion for the book's first seven chapters but arranging the remaining chapters thematically: Chapters 8-10 focus on Pearson's crucial relationships with modernist writers and his use of those relationships to advance their careers and canonization, Chapter 11 examines Pearson's role in the development of American Studies as a Cold War-influenced academic enterprise, and the final chapter teases out the complications of Pearson's relationship with the highly influential Yale University English department of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.This structure risks repetitiveness as Barnhisel picks up threads from the more straightforwardly "biographical" early chapters and weaves them in the thematic chapters, but he mostly avoids the risk.While the structure of discussions of Pearson's relationships with (and favors for) William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and W. H. Auden is similar in the chapter on these poets, Pearson is able, in his chapters on Pound and especially, on H.D. and Bryher, to make clear the scope of Pearson's role in bringing these poets' work to American readers.Pearson accomplished his important work on behalf of American poetry, as he did his work on behalf of America itself, through elite cultural institutions, and Barnhisel is an able chronicler of them as well as how Pearson moved in and through them.His discussions of Yale, for example, deftly sketch the distinctiveness of the university among the Ivies-Yale was, he writes, "for the ambitious, the ones seeking to become leaders"even as they position Pearson within the place's norms (38).As a paradigmatic "Organization Man," Pearson intuited and studied the mores and folkways of institutions, mastering their mechanisms so that, whether working with Oxford University Press on a new anthology of American literature or working with the OSS on