Encyclopedia of American Studies

Dorson, Richard Mercer

Among the first scholars to hold a doctoral degree in American civilization, Richard Dorson specialized in the study of folklore as a reflection of American culture. Complaining that prevalent literary and anthropological approaches to folklore fixated on remnants of ancient European tradition in the New World, Dorson affirmed the need to recognize an emergent national culture in the United States. He claimed that knowledge of this folklore, such as hero legends (e.g., Davy Crockett, John Henry) and folktypes of the cowboy and logger, provided a shared identity among Americans of diverse backgrounds. In American Folklore and the Historian (1971) he proposed a historical "theory for American folklore," making a claim for a distinctive American culture arising out of the special historical conditions of the United States for which folklore is primary evidence. He identified these conditions as America's colonial experience, westward movement, successive waves of immigration, rapid industrialization, aborigines and slaves, racial diversity, regionalism, patriotism and democracy, and the rise of a mass culture. He later expanded the idea to a "hemispheric theory of folklore," dividing the folklore of the Old and New Worlds for analytical purposes. He declared that each New World country needs to be analyzed for its ethnic-racial and historical conditions.

Dorson was born in New York City on March 12, 1916. He attended Phillips Exeter Academy from 1929 to 1933 and received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in history and literature in 1937. He continued his studies at Harvard, earning the M.A. in history in 1940 and a Ph.D. in history of American civilization in 1943. He joined the history faculty at Michigan State University in 1944 and remained there until 1956, when he served as a Fulbright professor in American studies at the University of Tokyo. In 1957, he went to Indiana University, where he remained to the end of his life with titles of distinguished professor of history and folklore, founding director of the Folklore Institute (established 1963), and first chairman of the folklore department (created in 1978). He also taught as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1968) and the University of Pennsylvania (1980). He was on the American Studies Program committee at Indiana University and encouraged joint degrees in folklore and American studies. Informally, he was known as the "dean of American folklorists" and "father of American folklore" for his direction of over two hundred dissertations and theses on American cultural historical topics such as legend, humor, ethnic and regional identity, literature, and oral history. The rapid growth of American folklore courses across the globe after the 1960s is owed largely to his scholarship and teaching.

Dorson was author or editor of over twenty-five books and over two hundred scholarly articles. His Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (1972) and Handbook of American Folklore (1983) were important textbooks of folklore studies. He also achieved popular renown for widely read books such as American Folklore (1959), American Negro Folktales (1967), and America in Legend (1973). He received three Guggenheim Fellowships�in 1949, 1964, and 1971�was an original member of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, and was a fellow of the National Humanities Center. He was editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1959 to 1963, president of the American Folklore Society in 1967�1968, and founding editor of the Journal of the Folklore Institute (1964�1981; later the Journal of Folklore Research). Dorson died on September 11, 1981, in Bloomington, Indiana, leaving his papers to the Lilly Library of Indiana University.

Dorson was critical of writers who popularized and fabricated folklore, commercializing material he dubbed "fakelore." He insisted, for example, that Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill were invented by journalists and pointed out that, in contrast, American folk heroes such as Davy Crockett tended to be transgressive "comic demigods." He proposed to historians the use of folkloric evidence to advance a plural social and a cultural picture of America at the grassroots and was particularly engrossed in early American print sources, which he mined for books such as America Begins (1950) and America Rebels (1953). In addition to looking to the preindustrial past for sources of folklore, he emphasized that folklore continues to be created anew in the contemporary period; he edited a landmark volume showing that new technologies foster rather than dissolve folklore, Folklore in the Modern World (1974). Dorson importantly proposed a model of folk culture existing with, and at the root of, popular culture to replace the characterization of the United States as a singular mass culture.

Dorson's publications often emphasized that folklore provided evidence of the cultural experience of groups and locations often left out of the historical record. He contributed influential field studies, for example, of African American, urban, occupational, and regional folklore, including Bloodstoppers and Bearwalkers: Folk Traditions of the Upper Peninsula (1952), Negro Folktales in Michigan (1956), Buying the Wind: Regional Folklore in the United States (1964), and Land of the Millrats (1981). He sought international and historical connections to research in folklore and American studies, evident in Folklore Research around the World: A North American Point of View (1961) and The Birth of American Studies (1976). Overall, Dorson was greatly influential in establishing folklore studies as a discipline that could significantly contribute to American studies by providing folkloric evidence of active national and subcultural traditions in the United States.

Simon J.Bronner

Bibliography

Abrahams, Roger D., Representative Man: Richard Dorson, Americanist, Journal of Folklore Research 26 (1989):27�34.

Bronner, Simon J., Richard Dorson and the Great Debates, in Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture, by Simon J. Bronner (Utah State Univ. Press 1998), 349�412.

Brunvand, Jan Harold, Richard M. Dorson (1916�1981), Journal of American Folklore 95 (1982):347�353.

Brunvand, Jan Harold, Dorson and the Urban Legend, Folklore Historian 7 (1990):16�22.

D�gh, Linda, Richard M. Dorson (1916�1981), Fabula 24 (1983):116�120.

Dorson, Richard M., American Folklore (Univ. of Chicago Press 1959).

Dorson, Richard M., American Folklore and the Historian (Univ. of Chicago Press 1971).

Dorson, Richard M., Folklore: Selected Essays (Ind. Univ. Press 1972).

Dorson, Richard M., America in Legend (Pantheon Bks. 1973).

Dorson, Richard M., The Birth of American Studies (Ind. Univ. Press 1976).

Dorson, Richard M., Folklore and Fakelore: Essays toward a Discipline of Folk Studies (Harvard Univ. Press 1976).

Dorson, Richard M., American Folklore vs. Folklore in America, Journal of the Folklore Institute 15 (1978):97�111.

Dorson, Richard M., The American Studies Type, American Quarterly 31 (1979):368�371.

Dorson, Richard M., Man and Beast in American Comic Legend (Ind. Univ. Press 1982).

Dorson, Richard M., ed., Handbook of American Folklore (Ind. Univ. Press 1983).

Georges, Robert A., ed., Richard M. Dorson's Views and Works: An Assessment, special issue of Journal of Folklore Research 26, no. 1 (Jan.�April 1989).

Georges, Robert A., ed., Special Section: Richard Dorson, Western Folklore 48, no. 4 (Oct. 1989):325�373.

McCarthy, William Bernard, Richard Dorson in Upper Michigan, Folklore Historian 17 (2000):23�33.

Mechling, Jay, Richard M. Dorson and the Emergence of the New Class in American Folk Studies, Journal of Folklore Research 26 (1989):11�26.

Zolkover, Adam, Dorson, Discipline Building, and "The Identification of Folklore in American Literature," Folklore Historian 23 (2006):45�59.