Clifton Fadiman Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Clifton Fadiman was born on May 15, 1904, in Brooklyn, New York, and came of age in a city whose libraries, bookstores, and classrooms fed his precocious love of reading. He attended Columbia University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1925. The Columbia of his era, with its emphasis on the Western canon and the notion of a coherent, demanding curriculum, left a lasting imprint; the Great Books ethos he encountered there, championed by teachers such as John Erskine, would later shape his own efforts to guide readers through enduring works of literature.

From Publishing to The New Yorker
After college, Fadiman entered publishing, working as an editor at Simon and Schuster. The job suited his wide-ranging curiosity and sharpened his skills as a line editor and literary advocate. He soon found an additional home at The New Yorker, where in the 1930s and early 1940s he served as a book critic and essayist under editor Harold Ross. The magazine's blend of urbanity and precision mirrored his own voice; his reviews were notable for their clarity, fairness, and the way they welcomed readers into conversation rather than shutting them out. In those years he also moved among the magazine's luminous circle, which included figures like E. B. White and James Thurber, learning the craft of writing that sounded effortless without ever being careless.

Radio and the National Classroom
Fadiman achieved national fame as the host and guiding intelligence of the radio quiz show Information Please, which debuted in 1938. With regular panelists John Kieran, Franklin P. Adams, and Oscar Levant, the program transformed erudition into entertainment. Listeners mailed in questions that ranged from classical literature to baseball lore, and Fadiman presided with a mixture of geniality and exactness that made expertise feel democratic. Information Please helped establish the idea that curiosity could be a public performance and a communal pleasure. The franchise spawned books and an almanac and briefly moved to television, and Fadiman remained a familiar presence on the new medium as a guest and host on cultural and talk programs during the early years of TV.

Books, Anthologies, and the Reading Plan
Parallel to his broadcasting, Fadiman built an enduring career as an anthologist, editor, and guide to books. His anthologies favored amplitude and surprise. A Treasury of Laughter gathered comic writing from many centuries and schools, insisting that wit and humor were serious parts of the literary inheritance. He edited Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie, unusual collections that brought together fiction and essays with mathematical themes, showing his delight in intellectual border crossings. He also compiled The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, a compendium of memorable stories about notable figures that captured the human faces behind public reputations.

No single project shows his educational mission more clearly than The Lifetime Reading Plan, a set of essays and suggestions designed to help general readers navigate foundational works. Revised over the decades and later updated with the scholar John S. Major, the plan balanced admiration for the Western tradition with a pragmatic sense of how modern readers could approach difficult texts. Fadiman's introductions, lucid, respectful, and never condescending, became models of how to invite readers into demanding books without diluting them.

Advisor, Critic, and Cultural Middleman
For decades Fadiman served the Book-of-the-Month Club as a judge and editorial advisor, writing introductions and notes that reached millions of subscribers. In that role he refined an American ideal of the cultivated generalist: a reader at ease with poetry and physics, with Euripides and baseball box scores. He often described himself less as an author than as a middleman of ideas, someone who carried books across the counter to new readers. His essays and forewords, scattered across hundreds of volumes, championed clarity, good prose, and the habit of reading widely beyond one's comfort zone.

Family and Collaborators
Fadiman's personal life intertwined with journalism and literature. He married Annalee Jacoby, a reporter and war correspondent who coauthored Thunder Out of China with Theodore H. White, and their household sustained the rhythms of editing, deadlines, and conversations about books. Their daughter, Anne Fadiman, became a distinguished essayist and reporter in her own right, a sign that the family trade in curiosity and lucid prose had passed to another generation. In broadcasting, Fadiman's long partnership with John Kieran, Franklin P. Adams, and Oscar Levant on Information Please brought complementary temperaments to the airwaves, Kieran's sports and classics mastery, Adams's epigrams, Levant's mordant musical wit, while Fadiman orchestrated the ensemble with an editor's ear.

Later Years and Legacy
Fadiman continued to write, edit, and advise well into old age, adjusting to new media and new reading publics without shedding his core belief that books enlarge the self. He spent his later years dividing time between editorial projects and appearances that reflected his enduring public appeal. He died on June 20, 1999, in Florida, closing a life that had traced nearly the entire arc of American mass media from the age of print through radio and television.

Clifton Fadiman's legacy rests less on a single masterpiece than on a body of work that made literature approachable without trivializing it. He treated intelligence as conversation rather than display, turning quiz shows into salons, anthologies into invitations, and prefaces into maps. To generations of readers who found their way to Chaucer or Chekhov through one of his introductions, he was the welcoming host at the door of a long, well-lit library.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Clifton, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Writing - Learning - Book.