Who is clifton fadiman

Unlike many men of letters, Clifton Fadiman thought of himself primarily as a guide to the wisdom of others. But as a guide, Fadiman had few equals: for over 60 years, the editor, essayist, anthologist, and broadcast personality led countless readers to myriad subjects. As an editor and judge for the Book-of-the-Month Club for over 50 years, he helped shape the reading choices of countless Americans.

He wrote for the Encyclopaedia Britannica as well as numerous magazines and compiled over two dozen anthologies on subjects ranging from mathematics to poetry to the pun.

On radio and television programs, most notably the radio quiz show Information, Please! He also became a consultant and contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. For an entry on the history of children's literature, he learned to read Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch in his mids he was already fluent in French and German. Indeed, children's literature remained a special love for Fadiman. In , he received the Dorothy C. McKenzie Award for his contributions to children's literature for his anthology, A World Treasury of Children's Literature, and other works.

He wrote informal essays for Holiday magazine for 10 years, abandoning the column when he discovered to his horror that he had written more essays than Charles Lamb. For one anthology of short stories, he wrote not only the introduction, but also 63 commentaries. In the early s, Fadiman, who once listed his avocations as wine and "the avoidance of exercise," co-authored the compendium The Joys of Wine with Sam Aaron.

Barzun considers Fadiman to be an "often unheralded, but powerful and important" influence on twentieth-century American letters. Fadiman's work on Information, Please! Fadiman once estimated that he had read over 25, books in his life, and he never stopped. Even after completely losing his sight in his early 90s, Fadiman continued to vet manuscripts for the Book of the Month Club.

His son, Kim, would make tapes of books for his father, who would dictate his impressions. And although he had to give up plans to edit personally the new edition of Mark Van Doren's World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse , he remained the volume's general editor.

In , a new book promised to point Americans toward enough literature to last them for decades. In The Lifetime Reading Plan , author Clifton Fadiman surveyed roughly celebrated literary works from antiquity to the modern age, providing brief essays on everything from Homer to Herman Melville to Aldous Huxley in hopes that readers would engage with them on their own.

He helped establish the Book-of-the-Month Club and served on its board for more than a half century. He was also a force in shaping Encyclopedia Britannica , served as book editor of the New Yorker, and moderated a game show, carried on radio and later TV, called Information, Please , in which an erudite panel of commentators fielded questions from audience members, who would win a set of the Britannica if they stumped the experts. Additionally, Fadiman worked in book publishing, as a magazine columnist, anthologist, and familiar essayist, his musings gathered in charming collections such as Party of One, Any Number Can Play , and Enter, Conversing.

But whatever his platform, Fadiman never lost sight of his first job as a teacher after graduating from Columbia University in Let it. The school is a far greater invention than the internal combustion engine. A good schoolmaster is a far more useful citizen than the average bank president, politician, or general, if only because what he transmits is what gives meaning to the life of the banker, the politician, the general.

We survive precisely as primitive man survived, that is, by force and cunning. But we live by ideas and faiths of which he had hardly a premonition. Thanks to the G. Bill, more Americans were going to college and being exposed to the humanities that Fadiman championed. The Reading Plan arrived shortly before John F. And radio and television, still relatively young media, seemed promising venues not only to entertain, but to educate. In this cultural moment, Fadiman imagined his audience. He was born in Brooklyn on May 15, His parents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.

Brooklyn is, or was, not a town, not a city, not a country. It was a world. Fadiman found the breadth and variety of Brooklyn stimulating. From an early age, books fed his mind too. I knew he was a great Norwegian dramatist, part of a world I was somehow moving toward.