A 1915 honors graduate of the university, Joseph Wood Krutch went on to earn the master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. He served in World War I, and in 1920 became associate professor at Brooklyn Polytechnical Institute. He taught at Vassar and in the English Department at Columbia for several years, being named in 1943 Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia.
He was a drama critic and associate editor of the Nation. He was several times president of the New York Drama Critics Circle. The author of more than two dozen books, he is known as academician, drama critic, literary biographer, and writer of works on natural history. In 1955 his The Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival, and the Modern Temper won the National Book Award for nonfiction. His autobiography, More Lives Than One, published in 1962, includes insights into his student days at UT. The manuscript for the book is in the Special Collections at the UT Libraries. He was a reporter for the Nation at the Scopes trial and was highly critical of President Morgan for not taking a stand in favor of the teaching of evolution, as President McVey of Kentucky had done. He was a charter inductee into the Alumni Academic Hall of Fame.