Clifton Paul Fadiman Biography Quotes 11 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Clifton Paul Fadiman was born in 1904 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a household where books and ideas were considered essential to a full life. Gifted with a quick wit and a formidable memory, he developed an early command of the English language and of classical literature. He studied at Columbia University, where he excelled in the humanities and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. Columbia introduced him to a lifelong ideal: that a broad, disciplined encounter with great writing could shape a mind and a citizen. The atmosphere of New York intellectual life in the 1920s deepened his belief that criticism could be both erudite and lucid, rigorous yet welcoming to general readers.

Publishing and Criticism
After college Fadiman entered publishing, working at Simon and Schuster during the late 1920s and 1930s. In that energetic house, led by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, he learned the craft of editing and the power of shaping a book for a wide audience without sacrificing standards. He soon became one of the nation's most recognizable critical voices through his book reviews and essays for the New Yorker in the 1930s and early 1940s. Writing under the editorship of Harold Ross and in the company of colleagues such as Katharine S. White, E. B. White, and James Thurber, he refined a style that combined clarity, dry humor, and a distaste for cant. Fadiman's columns guided readers through new fiction and nonfiction while keeping an eye on the living tradition that connected contemporary authors to Homer, Montaigne, and the novelists of the 19th century.

Radio and Television
Fadiman's voice reached an even wider public when he became the moderator of the radio quiz program Information Please, created by Dan Golenpaul and first broadcast in the late 1930s. The show featured a panel of polymaths and wits, notably the sportswriter and naturalist John Kieran, the columnist Franklin P. Adams, and the pianist and raconteur Oscar Levant. Fadiman's role was to set the pace, frame the questions, and keep the banter crisp without losing intellectual traction. In his hands, the program made knowledge entertaining without pandering, and it stood as a weekly demonstration that curiosity, memory, and conversation could be show business. He later brought the same sensibility to television, where he served as a genial presence on programs that prized cultivated talk and playful intelligence.

Books, Anthologies, and Advocacy for Reading
Fadiman believed that the classics and the best of contemporary writing should be accessible to anyone with interest and patience. That conviction animated a long career as an anthologist and guide to reading. He compiled collections that displayed his range of taste, including Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie, which delighted readers by revealing the literary pleasures of mathematical ideas. He assembled The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes, a compendium of wit and character sketches that reflected his love of epigram and story. He devoted special care to children's literature in projects such as The World Treasury of Children's Literature, arguing that a child's first encounters with books should be of the highest quality.

His best-known instructional work, The Lifetime Reading Plan, distilled decades of reading and teaching into an approachable map of essential books. Near the end of his career he revisited and broadened that project with scholar John S. Major as The New Lifetime Reading Plan, expanding beyond a narrowly Western canon and modeling the literary cosmopolitanism he had come to champion. For decades he also served as a judge and selector for the Book-of-the-Month Club, helping steer general readers toward worthwhile new titles and keeping faith with his belief that criticism was a public service.

Personal Life
Fadiman cultivated friendships and collaborations across journalism and publishing, and he carried the same devotion to letters into his home life. In midcentury he married the journalist Annalee Jacoby, known for her reporting from Asia and for coauthoring Thunder Out of China with Theodore H. White; together they formed an intellectual partnership that joined his editorial and critical instincts with her firsthand knowledge of world affairs. They raised two children, including the writer Anne Fadiman, whose essays and reportage reflect the same blend of clarity, curiosity, and humane judgment that marked her father's best work. Their other child, Kim Fadiman, pursued anthropological fieldwork and writing, an echo of the family's bent for observation and interpretation. Earlier in life, Fadiman had been married once before; though that marriage ended, he maintained lifelong respect for privacy in domestic matters, preferring to keep the focus on books and ideas rather than personal publicity.

Later Years and Legacy
In his later decades Fadiman continued to lecture, write forewords and introductions, and edit anthologies that brought older texts back into circulation. He remained an exemplar of an older critical ideal: the generalist who can range widely without superficiality. His death in 1999 closed a career that had spanned the rise of mass-market publishing, the golden age of radio, and television's consolidation as a cultural medium. What persisted throughout was a voice that treated readers and listeners as partners in discovery rather than as targets of display.

Clifton Fadiman's legacy lies not only in the books he edited and the programs he hosted, but in the standard he set for cultural conversation in the United States. He demonstrated that an editor could be a public educator, that a critic could be both exacting and generous, and that popular media could be hospitable to real learning. Through his work with colleagues from Harold Ross to John Kieran and Franklin P. Adams, through his partnership with Annalee Jacoby and the example of his daughter Anne Fadiman, he helped to keep alive a tradition in which literature, science, and the arts converse with one another. For generations of readers, his Lifetime Reading Plan provided a doorway into that conversation, and his genial presence on air reminded Americans that knowledge, shared with grace and humor, is one of the nation's abiding pleasures.

Our collection contains 11 quotes who is written by Clifton, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Friendship - Book - Contentment - Career.