Jacques Barzun

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Jacques Barzun
Painting of Barzun titled With Light from a New Dawn, 1947
Born
Jacques Martin Barzun

(1907-11-30)November 30, 1907
Créteil, France
DiedOctober 25, 2012(2012-10-25) (aged 104)
San Antonio, Texas, U.S.
Alma materColumbia University (BA, MA, PhD)
OccupationHistorian
RelativesLucy Barzun Donnelly (granddaughter)
Matthew Barzun (grandson)

Jacques Martin Barzun (

history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was also known as a philosopher of education.[2]
In the book Teacher in America (1945), Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.

A professor of history at

From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000), widely considered his magnum opus, was published when he was 93 years old.[3]

Life

Jacques Martin Barzun was born in

Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, the composer Edgard Varèse, and the writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig.[4]

While on a diplomatic mission to the United States during the

university education; thus, the twelve-year-old Jacques Martin attended Lycée Janson-de-Sailly until moving 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.[5][6]

As an undergraduate at

Great Books course. He was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954[9] and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.[10]

From 1955 to 1968, he served as Dean of the Graduate School, Dean of Faculties, and

Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. From 1968 until his 1975 retirement, he was University Professor at Columbia. From 1951 to 1963 Barzun was one of the managing editors of The Readers' Subscription Book Club, and its successor the Mid-Century Book Society (the other managing editors being W. H. Auden and Lionel Trilling), and afterwards was Literary Adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons
, 1975 to 1993.

In 1936, Barzun married Mariana Lowell, a violinist from a

Ambassador to the United Kingdom. On May 14, 2012 Jacques Barzun attended a symphony performance in his honor at which works by his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, were performed.[12]
He attended in a wheelchair and delivered a brief address to the crowd.

Barzun died at his home in

French verse, English prose composition, university teaching, detective fiction, [and] the state of intellectual life", described Barzun as a tall, handsome man with an understated elegance, thoroughly Americanized, but retaining an air of old-world culture, cosmopolitan in an elegant way rare for intellectuals".[15]

Career

Over seven decades, Barzun wrote and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including

research methods in history and the other humanities (The Modern Researcher, which has seen at least six editions, and is one of the thousand most widely held library items according to the OCLC[16]
).

Barzun did not disdain popular culture: his varied interests included

Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America the following year.[19]
Barzun was also an advocate of supernatural fiction, and wrote the introduction to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural.[20] Barzun was a proponent of the theatre critic and diarist James Agate, whom he compared in stature to Samuel Pepys.[21] Barzun edited Agate's last two diaries into a new edition in 1951 and wrote an informative introductory essay, "Agate and His Nine Egos".[22]

From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

Jacques Barzun continued to write on education and cultural history after 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, revealed a vast erudition and brilliance undimmed 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. With this work he gained an international reputation.[23] Reviewing it in the New York Times, historian William Everdell called the book "a great achievement" by a scholar "undiminished in his scholarship, research and polymathic interests," while also scrutinizing Barzun's scant treatment of figures like Walt Whitman and Karl Marx.[24] The book introduces several novel

Wall Street Journal.[26]

In his philosophy of writing history, Barzun emphasized the role of storytelling over the use of academic jargon and detached analysis. He concluded in From Dawn to Decadence that "history cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars".[27]

Recognition

In 1968, Barzun received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.[28][29] Barzun was appointed a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour.[30] In 2003, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush.

In 1993, his book "An Essay on French Verse: For Readers of English Poetry" won the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Poetry Award.

On October 18, 2007, he received the 59th Great Teacher Award of the Society of Columbia Graduates

in absentia
.

On March 2, 2011, Barzun was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, although he was not expected to be in attendance.[31][32] On April 16, 2011, he received the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement in absentia.

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 also received the Gold Medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president.

Works

See also

References

  1. ^ "Remembering Jacques Barzun: The Age of the Individual: 500 Years Ago Today". Center on Capitalism and Society. November 29, 2017. Archived from the original on December 12, 2021. Retrieved February 12, 2019.
  2. New York Times
    . Retrieved October 25, 2012.
  3. Wall Street Journal
    .
  4. ^ a b Gathman, Roger (October 13, 2000). "The Man Who Knew Too Much: Jacques Barzun, Idea Man". The Austin Chronicle. Retrieved September 16, 2009.
  5. ^ Kelly, Brian P. "Jacques Barzun, 1907–2012". The New Criterion. Retrieved October 2, 2021.
  6. OCLC 761221337
    .
  7. Columbia College Today. College.columbia.edu. Archived from the original
    on October 31, 2012. Retrieved October 28, 2012.
  8. ^ Directory of American Scholars, 6th ed. (Bowker, 1974), Vol. I, p. 32.
  9. ^ "Book of Members, 1780–2010: Chapter B" (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved May 20, 2011.
  10. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved May 19, 2022.
  11. ^ "Education: Parnassus, Coast to Coast". Time. June 11, 1956. Archived from the original on January 27, 2008. Retrieved November 1, 2012.
  12. ^ Martin, Deborah (May 14, 2012). "In the Spotlight: Honoring expert on Berlioz". San Antonio Express-News.
  13. ^ Rothstein, Edward (October 25, 2012). "Jacques Barzun Dies at 104; Cultural Critic Saw the Sun Setting on the West". New York Times.
  14. ^ "Jacques Barzun". The Daily Telegraph. October 26, 2012.
  15. ^ Epstein, Joseph (October 26, 2012). "Jacques Barzun: An Appreciation". Wall Street Journal.(subscription required)
  16. ^ 2005 OCLC list of 1000 most catalogued items
  17. ^ "Jacques Barzun, "Baseball's Best Cultural Critic", Turns His Back on the Game". bleacherreport.com. July 6, 2009. Retrieved October 26, 2012.
  18. ^ Holley, Joe (October 26, 2012). "Jacques Barzun, wide-ranging cultural historian, dies at 104". Washington Post.
  19. ^ "Search the Edgars Database". Mystery Writers of America. Archived from the original on July 31, 2020. Retrieved July 4, 2015.
  20. ^ "Author and teacher Jacques Barzun has written an authoritative introduction". B. Williams, "A Complete Guide for all lovers of horror" (Review of The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural. The Courier-Mail, January 31, 1987.
  21. ^ From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, Jacques Barzun, Harper Perennial, 2001.
  22. ^ The Later Ego. Consisting of Ego 8 and Ego 9. Introduction and notes by Jacques Barzun, Jacques Barzun, Crown Publishers, Inc., New York, 1951.
  23. Le Nouvel Observateur
    , which said "il a connu un rayonnement international avec la sortie de "From dawn to decadence". L'historien Jacques Barzun, auteur de "From dawn to decandence", est mort Créé le October 26, 2012 à 07h10, http://tempsreel.nouvelobs.com/monde/20121026.FAP2051/l-historien-jacques-barzun-auteur-de-from-dawn-to-decandence-est-mort.html
  24. ^ William R. Everdell, "Idea Man", review of From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present by Jacques Barzun, New York Times, May 21, 2000.
  25. ^ Age of Reason by Arthur Krystal in The New Yorker, October 22, 2007, p. 103
  26. Wall Street Journal
    , October 29, 2011. Retrieved on July 24, 2014.
  27. ^ From Dawn to Decadence, pp 654–656
  28. ^ "Website of St. Louis Literary Award". Archived from the original on August 23, 2016. Retrieved July 25, 2016.
  29. ^ Saint Louis University Library Associates. "Recipients of the Saint Louis Literary Award". Archived from the original on July 31, 2016. Retrieved July 25, 2016.
  30. ^ Krystal, Arthur, "Age of Reason: In his hundred years, Jacques Barzun has learned a thing or two." The New Yorker, October 22, 2007
  31. National Archives
    .
  32. ^ "News Archive | National Endowment for the Humanities". Neh.gov. Retrieved October 28, 2012.

Sources

External links

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