The New Criterion mourns the passing of Jacues Marin Barzun, historian, essayist, and intellectual.
Born in a suburb of Paris, Barzun studied at the Lycée Janson de Sailly and moved to the US at a young age. He attened Columbia and graduated as valedictorian in 1927, teaching his first course at the school that same summer. He stayed at the university until he retired in 1975.
Barzun was an expert in too many fields to name, publishing prolifically across topics ranging from baseball to medicine to art. In doing so, he was ardent in his populism, saying that it was “a responsibility of scholars” to write accessibly. He began work on his magnum opus when he was eighty-four. This tome, which surveyed 500 years of Western culture and argued that Western civilization was had started to decline, would become From Dawn to Decadence and would only be published when Barzun was ninety-two.
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