Discover the Best Books Written by Jacques Barzun

Jacques Martin Barzun was a French-American historian known for his studies of the 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. In the book Teacher in America (1945), Barzun influenced the training of schoolteachers in the United States.

A professor of history at Columbia College for many years, he published more than forty books, was awarded the American Presidential Medal of Freedom and was designated a knight of the French Legion of Honor. The historical retrospective 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.

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. 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 frequented his parents' Paris home.

While on a diplomatic mission to the United States during the First World War (1914–1918), 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 attended Lycée Janson-de-Sailly until moving to America, where he graduated from Harrisburg Technical High School in 1924 and then went off to Columbia University, where he obtained a liberal arts education.

As an undergraduate at Columbia College, Barzun was a 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. He taught history there from 1928 to 1955, becoming the Seth Low Professor of History and a founder of the discipline of cultural history. 

He and literary critic Lionel Trilling conducted Columbia's famous Great Books course for years. 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. 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 afterward was a Literary Adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975 to 1993.

In 1936, Barzun married Mariana Lowell, a violinist from a prominent Boston family. They had three children: James, Roger, and Isabel. Mariana died in 1979. In 1980, Barzun married Marguerite Lee Davenport. From 1996 the Barzuns lived in her hometown, San Antonio, Texas. His granddaughter Lucy Barzun Donnelly produced the award-winning HBO film Grey Gardens. 

His grandson, Matthew Barzun, is a businessman who served from 2009-2011 as the U.S. Ambassador to Sweden and from 2013-2017 as Ambassador to the United Kingdom. On May 14, 2012, Jacques Barzun attended a symphony performance in his honor, where works by his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, were performed. He attended in a wheelchair and delivered a brief address to the crowd.

Barzun died at his home in San Antonio, Texas, on October 25, 2012, aged 104. The New York Times, which compared him with such scholars as Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, and Lionel Trilling, called him a "distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history." Naming Edward Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, and Thomas Babington Macaulay as his intellectual ancestors and calling him "one of the West's most eminent historians of culture" and "a champion of the liberal arts tradition in higher education," who "deplored what he called the 'gangrene of specialism,'" The Daily Telegraph remarked, "The sheer scope of his knowledge was extraordinary. 

Barzun's eye roamed over the full spectrum of Western music, art, literature, and philosophy." Essayist Joseph Epstein remembered him in the Wall Street Journal as a "flawless and magisterial" writer who tackled "Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Berlioz, William James, French verse, English prose composition, university teaching, detective fiction, and the state of intellectual life," described Barzun as a tall, handsome man with understated elegance, thoroughly Americanized, but retaining an air of old-world culture, cosmopolitan in an elegant way rare for intellectuals."