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Parrington Hall
Parrington Hall is a red pressed-brick edifice which opened in 1902 as the Science Building. Today it contains the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs.
Vernon L. Parrington was professor of English from 1908 until his death in 1929. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for his monumental work, Main Currents in American Thought. He had worked off and on for 16 years on this history of American ideals and ideas as expressed in literature. The two volumes that won the Pulitzer plus the third that he was working on at the time of his death are still published in paperback.
The liberal Parrington put the same zest into his teaching that had marked his earlier years, when he briefly played semipro baseball and was the football and baseball coach at the University of Oklahoma. After his arrival here, word spread that his classes were among the liveliest on campus. There was always a long waiting list of students wishing to study with him. It is possible that Parrington would not have felt particularly honored to have the Science Building posthumously named for him. A forthright man, he had once observed tartly that the structure was "the ugliest I have ever seen."
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