Alvin Kernan

Alvin Kernan is the former dean of the Graduate School at Princeton, an emeritus professor of English, and one of America's leading scholars of Shakespeare and the Renaissance. The University of Wyoming described him as "a war hero, a scholar, a teacher, a thoughtful critic, a passionate advocate of the humanities, and a truly Renaissance man of virtue" in conferring an honorary Doctor of Letters on him in 2010.

Kernan grew up on a remote homestead in the mountains of southern Wyoming. During World War II he spent five years in the Navy, serving in aviation ordnance aboard USS Enterprise (CV-6) at Midway. He subsequently became an air crewman and flew with the first launch of carrier-borne night fighters in 1943, as the turret gunner of a radar-equipped TBF Avenger accompanying Hellcats in the hunt for Japanese bombers. It was on that mission that he witnessed the loss of the famous ace, "Butch" O'Hare.

Epitomizing the "greatest generation," Kernan earned both the Navy Cross and the Distinguished Flying Cross and later wrote passionately in tribute to his fellow servicemen in Crossing the Line (1995), his memoir about life as a Navy enlisted man aboard carriers in the Pacific, and in No Right to Win.

After the War, Kernan excelled at Williams College where he earned his first bachelor's degree and again at Exeter College at Oxford University where he earned his second bachelor's degree while on a Moody Fellowship. He later taught at Yale and then Princeton.

He This intellectual biography is largely about the clash of cultures and world views as universities passed through the crucible of the 1960s and 1970s. Like real war, this conflict also left scars.

recounted his more than 40 years in academic life in Plato's Cave, which carries on where that earlier narrative left off,

Articles by this Author

O’Hare’s Last Flight, Summer 2017 | Vol. 62, No. 1

The author took part in the first night combat with Japanese bombers. In that dramatic action, he witnessed the loss of Butch O'Hare, the famous World War II ace for whom O’Hare Airport was named.

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.