Friday, October 26, 2012

Jacques Barzun, R. I. P.

NYT: Jacques Barzun, Historian and: Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104. 

 His death was announced by Arthur Krystal, Barzun's friend and the executor of his estate. Mr. Barzun was a man of boundless curiosity, monumental productivity and manifold interests, encompassing both Berlioz and baseball. 

It was a life of the mind first cultivated more than a century ago in a childhood home outside Paris that became an avant-garde salon. 

Mr. Barzun stood beside Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Lionel Trilling as among the mid-20th century's most wide-ranging scholars, all of whom tried to reconcile the achievements of European culture and philosophy with the demands and tastes of American intellectual and cultural life.

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