Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Martin Barzun

Profile painting of Jacques Barzun around 1959.
Born November 30, 1907 (1907-11-30) (age 100)
Créteil, France
Occupation Historian

Jacques Martin Barzun (born November 30, 1907) is an eminent French-born American historian of ideas and culture. His areas of expertise are far-ranging including "French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology."[1]

Contents

[edit] Life

Born in Créteil, France to Henri-Martin and Anna-Rose Barzun, he spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble. His father was a member of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers and also worked in the French ministry of labor.[1] The Paris house of his parents was frequented by many "modernist" artists of belle epoque France, e.g., the poet Apollinaire, the Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, the composer Edgard Varèse, and the writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig.[2]

While on a diplomatic mission to the U.S. 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 valedictorian of the class of 1927 of Columbia College and was a prize-winning president of the Philolexian Society, a Columbia literary and debate 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. 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. On October 18, 2007, he received the 59th Great Teacher Award of the Society of Columbia Graduates in absentia.

In 1936, Barzun married Mariana Lowell, a violinist from a prominent Boston family, who died in 1979. They had three children: James, Roger, and Isabel.[3] In 1980 Barzun married Marguerite Lee Davenport. Since 1996 the Barzuns have lived in her home town of San Antonio, Texas.

[edit] 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 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 edition).

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. [2]

Barzun is a proponent of the theatre critic and diarist James Agate, who he compared in stature to Pepys.[3] Barzun edited Agate's last two diaries into a new edition in 1951, with an informative introduction "Agate and His Nine Egos".[4]

From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun
From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

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 800 pages, 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 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 2007, as Barzun approached his centenary, he remained intellectually and physically active but reliant upon "a cane or walker to get around," according to Arthur Krystal who visited him in San Antonio and wrote a piece about him for The New Yorker magazine. Barzun was fully "alert to the irony of aging," commenting from experience that: "Old age is like learning a new profession. And not one of your own choosing."[5]

[edit] Books by Barzun

  • 1927 Samplings and Chronicles: Being the Continuation of the Philolexian Society History, with Literary Selections From 1912 to 1927 (editor)
  • 1932 The French Race: Theories of Its Origins and Their Social and Political Implications
  • 1937 Race: a Study in Modern Superstition (Revised, 1965 Race: A Study in Superstition)
  • 1939 Of Human Freedom
  • 1941 Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage
  • 1943 Romanticism and the Modern Ego
  • 1945 Teacher in America
  • 1951 Pleasures of Music
  • 1954 God's Country and Mine: A Declaration of Love, Spiced with a Few Harsh Words
  • 1956 Music in American Life
  • 1956 The Energies of Art
  • 1959 The House of Intellect
  • 1960 Lincoln the Literary Genius (first published in The Saturday Evening Post, 14 February 1959)
  • 1961 The Delights of Detection
  • 1961 Classic, Romantic, and Modern
  • 1964 Science: The Glorious Entertainment
  • 1967 What Man Has Built (introductory booklet to the Great Ages of Man book series)
  • 1968 The American University: How It Runs, Where It Is Going
  • 1969 Berlioz and the Romantic Century (3d ed.)
  • 1971 On Writing, Editing, and Publishing
  • 1971 A Catalogue of Crime (with Wendell Hertig Taylor)
  • 1974 Clio and the Doctors
  • 1974 The Use and Abuse of Art
  • 1975 Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers
  • 1976 The Bibliophile of the Future: His Complaints about the Twentieth Century
  • 1980 Three Talks at Northern Kentucky University
  • 1982 Lincoln's Philosophic Vision
  • 1982 Critical Questions
  • 1983 A Stroll with William James
  • 1986 A Word or Two Before You Go: Brief Essays on Language
  • 1989 The Culture We Deserve: A Critique of Disenlightenment
  • 1991 An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry
  • 1991 Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
  • 2000 From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present
  • 2001 Sidelights on Opera at Glimmerglass
  • 2002 A Jacques Barzun Reader
  • 2002 What is a School? and Trim the College!
  • 2003 The Modern Researcher (6th ed.) (with Henry F. Graff)
  • 2004 Four More Sidelights on Opera at Glimmerglass: 2001-2004

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.

Works about or to Jacques Barzun:

  • 1977 From Parnassus: Essays in honour of Jacques Barzun"- Edited by Dora B. Weiner & William R. Keylor

[edit] References

  1. ^ Age of Reason by Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker, October 22, 2007, p. 94
  2. ^ The Edgars and Other MWA Awards. Mystery Writers of America. Retrieved on 2007-07-02.
  3. ^ From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun, Harper Perennial, 2001.
  4. ^ The Later Ego. Consisting of Ego 8 and Ego 9. Introduction and notes by Jacques Barzun, Jacques Barzun, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1951.
  5. ^ Age of Reason by Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker, October 22, 2007, p. 103

[edit] External links

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