Fadiman, Clifton (1904-1999)

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Fadiman, Clifton (1904-1999)

Clifton Fadiman is a man of letters whose effectiveness as a broadcast personality helped him spread the gospel of the rewards of book reading to a wide public. A book reviewer for The New Yorker and other distinguished periodicals, Fadiman found fame in the late 1930s and most of the 1940s as the host of the radio quiz program, Information, Please! Taking advantage of his radio popularity, Fadiman appeared in magazines as an essayist and critic, and between hard covers as an anthology editor and introduction writer. Through his introductions and prefaces to the world's great books, he became one of the first and most distinguished of that unique breed of twentieth-century scribes: the "popularizer." The advent of television kept Fadiman in the public eye, and he continued to be an unpretentious but fervent advocate for the joys of reading and the pleasures of the civilized life.

Clifton (Paul) Fadiman ("Kip" to his friends) was born May 15, 1904 in Brooklyn, New York. Before he had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1925, he had already managed a bookstore, devised the standard translation of Nietzsche's Ecce Homo, and begun selling articles to national periodicals, including book reviews for the Nation. In 1927, Fadiman began a fruitful association with Simon and Schuster when he was hired as a reader and assistant editor. Within two years, he had been promoted to general editor, a position he held until the mid-1930s. While still with Simon and Schuster, Fadiman wrote book reviews for Harper's Bazaar and Stage ; in 1933, he began a ten-year stint as the New Yorker's book editor. Urbane yet unpretentious, Fadiman claimed that, "I look for clarity above all in what I read." These qualities—plus his penchant for the "atrocious" pun—made him the perfect person to peddle erudition to the masses when, in 1938, he was hired to moderate a distinguished but good-humored panel—Franklin P. Adams, John Kieran, and Oscar Levant—on the NBC radio program, Information, Please! Aided considerably by Levant's iconoclastic wit, the show, in which listeners competed for sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica by submitting questions with which they hoped to "stump the experts," became both a critical and popular success, running for the next ten years.

During this period, Fadiman expanded his activities to include writing introductions for such classics as War and Peace and Moby Dick. He left the New Yorker to join the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club, but he continued to promote the classics through the writing and editing of various introductions and anthologies, and the creation of a Lifetime Reading Plan. Information, Please! faded in the late 1940s, and the 1950s found Fadiman writing a series of essays in Holiday magazine under the title, "Party of One." He also had no trouble making the transition from radio to television, where he contributed his witty presence to such quiz shows as What's in a Word? and The Name's the Same, although probably closer to his heart was the radio show he co-hosted concurrently on NBC with Columbia Professor Jacques Barzun, Conversation.

In his writings, Fadiman came across as learned but genial, and far from snobbish (although he was not above quoting a remark of Dvorak without translating it into English). His inclusion of science fiction stories in his anthologies, Fantastia Mathematica and Mathematical Magpie, probably helped create the atmosphere in which that once-despised genre began acquiring literary respectability. To the general public, Fadiman so personified the world of great books that when one man was asked to name his favorite work of literature, he responded: "Clifton Fadiman's introduction to War and Peace. "

—Preston Neal Jones