1. Jacques Martin Barzun was a French-born American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history.
28 Facts About Jacques Barzun
1. 2.
Jacques Barzun wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and classical music, and was known as a philosopher of education.
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Jacques Martin Barzun was born in Creteil, France, to Henri-Martin Barzun and Anna-Rose Barzun, and spent his childhood in Paris and Grenoble.
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Jacques Barzun's father was a member of the Abbaye de Creteil group of artists and writers, and worked in the French Ministry of Labor.
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Jacques Barzun obtained a master's degree in 1928 and a Ph.
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Jacques Barzun was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954 and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1984.
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From 1951 to 1963 Barzun was one of the managing editors of The Readers' Subscription Book Club, and its successor the Mid-Century Book Society, and afterwards was Literary Adviser to Charles Scribner's Sons, 1975 to 1993.
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In 1936, Jacques Barzun married Mariana Lowell, a violinist from a prominent Boston family.
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Jacques Barzun's granddaughter Lucy Barzun Donnelly was a producer of the award-winning HBO film Grey Gardens.
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Jacques Barzun's grandson, Matthew Barzun, is a businessman who served from 2009 to 2011 as the US Ambassador to Sweden, and from 2013 to 2017 as Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
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On May 14,2012, Jacques Barzun attended a symphony performance in his honor at which works by his favorite composer, Hector Berlioz, were performed.
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Jacques Barzun attended in a wheelchair and delivered a brief address to the crowd.
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Jacques Barzun died at his home in San Antonio, Texas on October 25,2012, aged 104.
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Jacques Barzun's eye roamed over the full spectrum of Western music, art, literature and philosophy.
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Over seven decades, Jacques Barzun wrote and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine, psychiatry from Robert Burton through William James to modern methods, and art, and classical music; he was one of the all-time authorities on Hector Berlioz.
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Jacques Barzun had a strong interest in the tools and mechanics of writing and research.
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Jacques Barzun undertook the task of completing, from a manuscript almost two-thirds of which was in first draft at the author's death, and editing, the first edition of Follett's Modern American Usage.
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Jacques Barzun was the author of books on literary style, on the crafts of editing and publishing, and on research methods in history and the other humanities.
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Jacques Barzun did not disdain popular culture: his varied interests included detective fiction and baseball.
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Jacques Barzun was an advocate of supernatural fiction, and wrote the introduction to The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural.
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Jacques Barzun was a proponent of the theatre critic and diarist James Agate, whom he compared in stature to Samuel Pepys.
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Jacques Barzun edited Agate's last two diaries into a new edition in 1951 and wrote an informative introductory essay, "Agate and His Nine Egos".
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Jacques Barzun continued to write on education and cultural history after retiring from Columbia.
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Jacques Barzun concluded in From Dawn to Decadence that "history cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars".
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In 1968, Jacques Barzun received the St Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.
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Jacques Barzun was appointed a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour.
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On March 2,2011, Jacques Barzun was awarded the 2010 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, although he was not expected to be in attendance.
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Jacques Barzun received the gold medal for Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he was twice president.