U.S. author and teacher whose writings range through surveys of literature to novels, biography, and criticism.

Educated at Columbia University (Ph.D., 1911), Van Doren taught there until 1930. In that period he was one of a group of academicians who helped to establish American literature and history as an integral part of university programs. He also served as managing editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–21) and literary editor of The Nation (1919–22) and Century Magazine (1922–25).

For his discerning biography Benjamin Franklin (1939), Van Doren won a Pulitzer Prize. Other works include The American Novel (1921; revised 1940); Contemporary American Novelists (1922); American and British Literature Since 1890 (1925), in collaboration with his brother, Mark Van Doren, and revised in 1939; and What Is American Literature? (1935). His autobiography, Three Worlds, appeared in 1936.