As he put it in a prefatory note, “Beatrice Kevitt Hofstadter shared equally with me in the task of revision.” And in a literary profile published several years later, he showed the reporter a passage from Social Darwinism he and Beatrice had polished: “We made - I say ‘we’ because I get a tremendous amount of editorial criticism from my wife - some seven or eight hundred changes, nearly all of them purely stylistic.”īeatrice’s role as an editor matters because of Richard Hofstadter’s reputation among historians today: Many dispute his interpretations, but he is almost unanimously lauded for his confident, pithy prose style. Her advice has been indispensable.” She played a large part in the second edition of Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955), originally published in 1944 as Richard’s revised dissertation. who has developed the art of the editor and the textual critic into a major gift for asking the right questions. In The Age of Reform, he wrote, “Thanks are due above all to my wife. The problem with wanting brilliant faculty wives to be recognized as coauthors is that some aspects of their situation aren’t unique.īeatrice Kevitt Hofstadter (later White) used her skills as an editor to help her husband - contributions he credited in rich acknowledgments. If nothing else, keeping the crowded house quiet afforded Richard the ability to concentrate. For historians who analyze gendered labor in the home, this domesticity raises questions about the role of faculty wives in scholarly production. Soon after they married, in 1947, she adopted his son, Daniel, who was just a toddler.

Both were from Buffalo, though they hadn’t known each other growing up. Both Beatrice and Richard had outlived their first spouses. Nearly all of Richard’s iconic works of history, including the Pulitzer Prize winners The Age of Reform (1955) and Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963), emerged from domestic arrangements like this. As the Hofstadters summered with members of New York’s intellectual elite, the likes of the Kazins and the Trillings, Richard continued writing in the mornings. In the spring they would decamp to Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, where they bought a house in the mid-1950s. (French doors separating the two rooms had been removed.) When they were home the children played in this room, and in this room his wife, Beatrice, occupied Mother’s Reading Chair, as the family called it. His desk stood toward one end of the front room of the apartment, a double parlor. A disciplined writer, Hofstadter woke early to keep to his daily regimen of three pages.

For most of the 24 years Richard Hofstadter was a professor in the Columbia University history department - from 1946 until his death from leukemia in 1970, at age 54 - he and his family lived in an apartment near campus, on Claremont Avenue.

America at 1750 by Richard Hofstadter