The Magazine

When Books Were Great

Furrowing the American middlebrow.

Dec 22, 2008, Vol. 14, No. 14 • By CHRISTINE ROSEN
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A Great Idea at the Time

The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books

by Alex Beam

Public Affairs, 256 pp., $24.95

The death of reading has been much in the news lately, and so Alex Beam's new book, a rollicking tour of the Great Books movement that flourished in the United States in the 1940s and '50s, is timely indeed. Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe, is a beguiling guide. With fluid prose and (thank goodness) a sense of humor about the terrifying earnestness that often permeated the Great Books enterprise, he gives the movement the respect it deserves but does not avoid pointing out its excesses and missteps.

We meet people like John Erskine, the grandfather of the Great Books movement and a "gentleman of the old school," as Beam describes him. Erskine believed a great book was one that "has meaning, and continues to have meaning, for a variety of people over a long period of time," and he was responsible for creating Columbia's core curriculum program in the 1910s, which introduced students to Thucydides, Herodotus, and Montaigne, among others, and a version of which is still part of the university's requirement for undergraduates.

Beam also offers an intriguing portrait of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the debonair Yale Law School dean who, after becoming president of the University of Chicago, introduced a Great Books seminar in the 1930s. The seminar, which eventually drew students such as future Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and future critic Susan Sontag, engaged students in Socratic-style questioning about Plato, Aristotle, and other great authors of the Western canon, and drew nationwide attention for its novel approach to classic texts.

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