Jacques Barzun

Lore & Background

Jacques Martin Barzun was born in Créteil, France, to Henri-Martin Barzun and Anna-Rose Barzun, and 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. His parents' Paris home was frequented by many modernist artists of Belle Époque France, such as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, the composer Edgard Varèse, and the writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig. While on a diplomatic mission to the United States during the First World War, Barzun's father so liked the country he decided that his son should receive an American university education; thus, the twelve-year-old Jacques Martin, after attending the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly, was sent to America, where he graduated from Harrisburg Technical High School in 1923 and then went off to Columbia University, where he obtained a liberal arts education.

As an undergraduate at Columbia College, Barzun was drama critic for the Columbia Daily Spectator, a prize-winning president of the Philolexian Society, the Columbia literary and debate club, and valedictorian of the class of 1927. He obtained a master's degree in 1928 and a Ph.D. in 1932 from Columbia, 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 conducted Columbia's famous Great Books course. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984. 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.

Reader's Guide

Over seven decades, Barzun wrote and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine, psychiatry, art, and classical music; he was one of the all-time authorities on Hector 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 had a strong interest in the tools and mechanics of writing and research. He undertook the task of completing, from a manuscript almost two-thirds of which was in first draft at the author's death, and editing (with the help of six other people), the first edition (published 1966) of Follett's Modern American Usage. Barzun was also the author of books on literary style (Simple and Direct, 1975), on the crafts of editing and publishing (On Writing, Editing, and Publishing, 1971), and on research methods in history and the other humanities (The Modern Researcher, which has seen at least six editions).

Barzun did not disdain popular culture: his varied interests included detective fiction and baseball. His widely quoted statement, 'Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,' was inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame. He edited and wrote the introduction to the 1961 anthology, The Delights of Detection, which included stories by G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Rex Stout, and others. In 1971, Barzun co-authored (with Wendell Hertig Taylor), A Catalogue of Crime, for which he and his co-author received a Special Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America the following year. Barzun was also an advocate of supernatural fiction, and wrote the introduction to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. At 84 years of age, he began writing his swan song, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, which became a New York Times bestseller and gained him an international reputation.

Did You Know?

• Barzun was drama critic for the Columbia Daily Spectator as an undergraduate and was valedictorian of the class of 1927.
• He co-founded the discipline of cultural history and conducted Columbia's famous Great Books course with Lionel Trilling.
• His statement about baseball being key to understanding America is inscribed on a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame.
• Barzun completed and edited the first edition of Follett's Modern American Usage from a manuscript left two-thirds in first draft at the author's death.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve." — Jacques Barzun "Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition." — Jacques Barzun "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game — and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams." — Jacques Barzun "The Energies of Art: Studies of Authors Classic and Modern (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956), "Whirligig: Last Words on Berlioz" — Jacques Barzun