American scholar and critic who did much to popularize the teaching of contemporary literature.

Phelps attended Yale University (B.A., 1887; Ph.D., 1891) and Harvard University (M.A., 1891), taught at Harvard for a year, and then returned to Yale, where he was for 41 years a member of the English department and Lampson professor from 1901 until his retirement in 1933. For years his students voted him Yale's most inspiring professor. In 1895 he taught the first American college course in the modern novel. Both in his courses and in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), Phelps was influential in introducing Russian novelists (Russian literature) to American readers.

Phelps was a popular lecturer and critic, and his literary essays that appeared in Scribner's Magazine and other periodicals, together with his syndicated newspaper column, “A Daily Thought,” brought him an audience estimated in the millions. His Autobiography with Letters was published in 1939.