Jacques Barzun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
Jacques Martin Barzun
Born November 30, 1907 (1907-11-30) (age 99)
Créteil, France

Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907, in Créteil, France) is a leading American historian of ideas and culture. His reputation, such as it is, is that of a political and social conservative and an eloquent defender of tradition in the practice of higher education and scholarship. But a closer consideration of his works will reveal the unsoundness of any such labels to describe his attitudes or thought. As his friend, Lionel Trilling, said, "It's much more complicated."

Life

Barzun spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. His father Henri Martin-Barzun was a member of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers. The Paris house of his parents was frequented by many "modernist" artists of belle epoque France, e.g., the poet Apollinaire, the Cubist painters Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, the composer Edgard Varèse, and the writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig.

While on a diplomatic mission to the USA during the First World War, Barzun's father so liked what he saw there that he decided that his son should have an American university education, a conclusion startlingly out of character for a French artist and intellectual of that time. Thus Jacques was sent to the USA at the tender age of 12, first to attend a preparatory school, then Columbia University where he obtained a broad liberal education. His artistic family background naturally inclined him to the study of cultural history, then a new branch of history.

Barzun was first in the 1927 class of Columbia College and was a prize-winning member of the Philolexian Society, a Columbia debating club. He obtained his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1932, and taught history there from 1928 to 1955, becoming the Seth Low Professor of History and a founder of the discipline of cultural history. For years, he and literary critic Lionel Trilling ran Columbia's famous Great Books course. From 1955 to 1968, he served as Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of Faculties, and Provost, while also being an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. From 1968 until his 1975 retirement, he was University Professor at Columbia. From 1975 to 1993 he was Literary Adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons. Since 1996, Barzun has resided in San Antonio, Texas.

The American Philosophical Society honors Barzun with its Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, awarded annually since 1993 to the author of a recent distinguished work of cultural history. He has also received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president. In 2003, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ideas

Over seven decades, Barzun has written and edited over 40 books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine, psychiatry from Robert Burton through William James to modern methods, and art, and classical music; he is one of the all-time authorities on Berlioz. Some of his books - particularly The Teacher in America and The House of Intellect - enjoyed a substantial lay readership and influenced debate about culture and education far beyond the realm of academic history.

Barzun has a strong interest in the tools and mechanics of writing and research. He edited the 1966 edition of Follett's Modern American Usage, and is the author of books on style (Simple and Direct, 1975), on the craft of editing and publishing (On Writing, Editing, and Publishing, 1971), and on research methods in history and humanities (The Modern Researcher, now in its 6th ed.)

Barzun does not disdain popular culture; his varied interests include detective fiction and baseball. He edited, and wrote the introduction to, the 1961 anthology The Delights of Detection, which included stories by G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, and others. In 1971, he co-authored, with Wendell Hertig Taylor, A Catalogue of Crime: Being a Reader's Guide to the Literature of Mystery, Detection, & Related Genres, for which he and Taylor received a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1972.

He has continued to write on education and cultural history since retiring from Columbia. At 84 years of age, he began writing his swan song, to which he devoted the better part of the 1990s. The resulting book of more than 800pp, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, reveals a vast erudition and brilliance, undiminished by advanced age. Historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers all lauded From Dawn to Decadence as a sweeping and powerful, albeit idiosyncratic, survey of modern Western history, and it became a New York Times bestseller. The book introduces several novel typographic devices that enable an unusually rich system of cross-referencing, as well as help keep its many strands of thought under organized control. Almost every page features a sidebar containing a pithy quotation from some author or historical figure; most are surprising, little known, and humorous.

In 2002, Barzun wrote the introduction to Mortimer Frank's book Toscanini: The NBC Years.

Books by Barzun

Barzun has also translated a number of works of French literature into English, and edited writings by others, including the selected letters of Lord Byron and John Jay Chapman.

External links

On From Dawn to Decadence:

THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE THE BOTTOM LINE