Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand is an American retired folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah.
Brunvand is best known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend, a form of modern folklore or story telling. Urban legends are "too good to be true" stories that travel by word of mouth, by print, or by the internet and are attributed to an FOAF: friend of a friend. "Urban legends," Brunvand says, "have a persistent hold on the imagination because they have an element of suspense or humor, they are plausible and they have a moral."
Though criticized for the "popular" rather than "academic" orientation of his books, The Vanishing Hitchhiker and others, Brunvand felt that it was a "natural and worthwhile part of his job as a folklorist to communicate the results of his research to the public."
For his lifetime dedication to the field of folklore, which included radio and television appearances, a syndicated newspaper column, and over 100 publications, Brunvand is considered to be "the legend scholar with the greatest influence on twentieth-century media."
Early life and education
Brunvand was born on March 23, 1933, in Cadillac, Michigan, to Norwegian immigrants Harold N. Brunvand and Ruth Brunvand. He and his two siblings, Tor and Richard, were brought up in Lansing, Michigan. Brunvand graduated from J. W. Sexton High School in Lansing in 1951.From high school, Brunvand attended Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan, where, in 1955, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. While at Michigan State, he attended a Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant upon graduation. Brunvand went on to earn a Master of Arts degree in English from the same university in 1957. He briefly served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps at Fort Monmouth and was discharged with the rank of 1st Lieutenant.
Academic career
While attending Michigan State, Brunvand met Richard Dorson, a folklorist and professor, who became a mentor. Brunvand took an undergraduate American Folklore course Dorson offered in the fall quarter of 1954 and, in subsequent semesters, completed two of Dorson's graduate courses in folklore as a special enrollee. The work Brunvand and other classmates did for Dorson's classes included "preparing a large and well organized personal collection of folklore garnered from oral tradition and furnished with informant data and background comments." These papers would later serve as the beginnings of a large archive of folklore housed at Indiana University.On June 10, 1956, Brunvand married Judith Darlene Ast, also a student at Michigan State University. Four days later, the couple left for Oslo, Norway, where Brunvand attended the University of Oslo on a Fulbright scholarship. He spent the year studying folklore. He started publishing in academic publications during this period, notably a paper on Norwegian-American folklore in the archives of Indiana University and one about the Norwegian folk hero Askeladden.
In 1957, Brunvand returned to the United States as a graduate student at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. He switched majors, from English to folklore, and took a series of classes offered through the university's summer institute. He worked as an archivist in the Indiana University Folklore Archives from September 1958 to June 1960. During this time, he met Archer Taylor, who, as a visiting professor, taught a course on proverbs and riddles. This course, according to Brunvand, "changed his life." Proverbs became one of Brunvand's favorite topics to study and discuss. In 1961, Brunvand's A Dictionary of Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases from Books Published by Indiana Authors Before 1890 was published as Number 15 of the Indiana University's Folklore Series. Of the book, Brunvand says two things: "I've become better at choosing titles since then," and "The price was $3.00, and it was worth every penny of it.
In 1961, Brunvand also received a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University. His dissertation, The Taming of the Shrew: A Comparative Study of Oral and Literary Versions, later published by Routledge in 1991, highlighted his interest in the structure, morphology and typology of the folktale.
Brunvand taught at the University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho, from 1961 to 1965. He served as associate editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1963 to 1967.
In 1965, Brunvand taught for a year at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, Illinois, focusing on folktales, folklore and literature, before moving with his wife and four children to the University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, where he remained a professor until his retirement in 1996.
By 1967, Brunvand was a member of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. He had also served as Book Review Editor for the Journal of American Folklore, which he resigned after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship research grant in 1970 to study folklore in Romania. He also won a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities that same year. Throughout the next decade, Brunvand focused his research on Romanian folklore, with a particular interest in Romanian house decoration. He returned to Romania in 1973-74 and again in 1981, receiving grants from the International Research & Exchanges Board to continue his studies. His research would later be published in a single volume collection titled Casa Frumoasa: The House Beautiful in Rural Romania, published by East European Monographs in 2003.
In 1968, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction was published by W.W. Norton and Company. Brunvand received an Honorable Mention for this book in a 1969 Chicago Folklore Prize competition. The Chicago Folklore Prize is "supported by an endowment established by the International Folklore Association and is awarded annually by the University of Chicago for an important contribution to the study of folklore."
Brunvand's A Guide for Collectors of Folklore in Utah was published by Utah Publications in the American West in 1971.
In the years 1973 to 1976, Brunvand, again, took on the role of associate editor for the Journal of American Folklore. He was named Folklore Fellow by the American Folklore Society in 1974 and was elected president of the organization in 1985.
From 1977 to 1980, Brunvand served as editor of the Journal of American Folklore, with the goal of making the journal more readable and useful to its major audience, American folklorists. He widened the scope of the journal by including articles written by those outside folklore, but whose work was "relevant to that being done by professional folklorists." He wanted to emphasize folklore and literature, folklore and history, folklife, festival and modern folklore.
In 1976, Brunvand's book Folklore: A Study and Research Guide was published by St. Martin's Press. The book, intended for undergraduate folklore students, was a research tool with a bibliographic guide and tips for researching term papers.
Brunvand edited two other textbooks: Readings in American Folklore, published by W.W. Norton and Company in 1979, American Folklore: An Encyclopedia, published by Garland in 1996.
"Mr. Urban Legend"
While teaching folklore at the University of Utah, Brunvand noticed a disconnect with his students and their views toward folklore. "They always seemed to think that folklore belonged to somebody else, usually in the past, that was something quaint and outdated." He began asking his students to think about and discuss stories from their own lives. These stories helped form the basis of a collection which Brunvand later included in several popular books on the topic of urban legends.In 1981, Brunvand's first book devoted to urban legends was published. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings helped to popularize the topic for a student audience. Urban legends, Brunvand explains, are "kissing cousins of myths, fairy tales and rumors. Legends differ from rumors because the legends are stories, with a plot. And unlike myths and fairy tales, they are supposed to be current and true, events rooted in everyday reality that at least could happen." Urban legends reflect modern-day societal concerns, hopes and fears, but are "weird whoppers we tell one another, believing them to be factual."
Over the next two decades, Brunvand added to the collection with "new" urban legends: The Choking Doberman and Other "New" Urban Legends, The Big Book of Urban Legends, The Mexican Pet: More "New" Urban Legends, Curses! Broiled Again!, The Baby Train: And Other Lusty Urban Legends, Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends, and The Truth Never Stands in the Way of a Good Story!. He made several appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and, in 1987, began a twice-weekly syndicated newspaper column called Urban Legends. He participated in countless radio talk shows and dozens of press interviews, educating people about this pass-along folk narrative that, typically involves people misunderstanding or making false assumptions about a story they heard. They forget details and fill in the gaps by inventing what they are missing to make sense of the story. Though criticized for the popular orientation of his books, Brunvand was dedicated to publicizing the field of folklore, exploring the roots of the stories, where possible, and, in some cases debunking them. "Folklorists fill different educational roles," Brunvand told members of The Missouri Folklore Society in 2003, "sometimes in classrooms, but often in a more public forum. I believe that the public and media image of what a folklorist does is in fact part of what we should be doing, whether we were trained specifically for it or not, whether we work in academe or not, and whether we like it or not."
Brunvand and his books became so popular, that, when Richard Wolkomir dubbed him "Mr. Urban Legend" in an article for the Smithsonian, the title was later added to book jackets and other publicity. In an article for Western Folklore, Brunvand mentioned a notice he found on a computer newsgroup dated 1 March 1989, presumably an insider's joke: "I think Jan Harold Brunvand, alleged author of The Choking Doberman, is an urban legend. Has anybody ever actually seen this guy?" A Harvard Lampoon publication, Mediagate, parodied urban legend books with this fake publisher's notice: "Bookman Publishing's Catalog for Fall '87: The Embarrassing Fart and More New Urban Legends by Jan Harold Brunvand. Yet another set of rumors, tall tales, and fourth-hand hearsay compiled by the author of The Vanishing Hitchhiker. Includes more recent urban legends such as the Senile President, the Adulterous Evangelist, and the Smelly Gym Sock in the Big Mac. 233 pages hardbound. $34.95."