A DEPARTED SEEKER:

Daniel Boorstin Dies at 89: Historian Led Museum and Library of Congress (Bart Barnes, February 29, 2004, Washington Post)

Boorstin was born in Atlanta and grew up in Tulsa. He entered Harvard University at the age of 15, and he wrote his senior honors thesis there on Edward Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Gibbon, he would say later, became a model for his work as a writer of history.

He attended Oxford University's Balliol College as a Rhodes scholar, then returned to the United States, where he received a doctorate in law at Yale Law School. He was teaching at Harvard Law School in 1940 when he met his future wife, Ruth Frankel, who was the sister of a legal assistant working for him.

They met on Christmas. "When he came through the door, I knew this was it. This was the man I was going to marry," she said yesterday. They were married in April 1941, and she would become one of his primary editors over the course of his career.

"Without her, I think my works would have been twice as long and half as readable," Boorstin was quoted as saying in the introduction to "The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader" in 1995.

"He was a joy to edit, and he welcomed it," Ruth Boorstin said. "He welcomed suggestions, and he followed them."

For a period in the 1930s, Boorstin was a member of the Communist Party. This was an act of youthful folly, he told members of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, and he gave them the names of fellow party members. [...]

He became librarian of Congress in 1975 over the opposition of the Congressional Black Caucus, which opposed his stands against affirmative action and attacks on student radicals during the 1960s. As librarian, he directed a $200 million-a-year operation and a staff of 5,800 in three buildings that held 20 million books and millions more maps, motion pictures, photographs, prints, recordings, videocassettes, presidential papers and such treasures as rare manuscripts and a Stradivarius violin.

He wanted to make the library a "serious but not solemn place," and he ordered the installation of picnic tables around a plaza and instituted midday concerts. Over some objections, he ordered the bronze doors of the Jefferson Building opened, declaring, "They said it would make a draft, and I say that's just what we needed." [...]

During his years at the library, Boorstin habitually rose at 4:30 or 5 a.m., went downstairs to his study and wrote on a manual typewriter for two or three hours before breakfast, then went off to work. He continued to write in retirement, including "The Seekers," which was published in 1998. That was the third volume in his world history trilogy, the other two being "The Discoverers," in 1983, and "The Creators," in 1992.

The Discoverers is an especially fine history of science, second only to Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age in the Milky Way.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 2, 2004 8:53 AM