With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Jacques Barzun's most successful book published when he was 92

Jacques Barzun was one of the great thinkers of the past century — a scholar who, in a remarkable eight-decades-long career, wrote dozens of books and analyzed subjects ranging from classical music to detective fiction, and from Jonathan Swift to baseball.

Barzun, who died yesterday in San Antonio at age 104, is best remembered for a book that, amazingly, he published in 2000 at age 92: From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life From 1500 to the Present, a sprawling 877-page opus that ambitiously sought to cover the ideas hatched by every great mind in European and American culture, from Martin Luther and  Molière to comedian Bill Murray. While Barzun’s dour view, as Atlantic magazine blogger David Wagner puts it, was that western civilization “has been declining steadily since the Renaissance,” his own productivity as a writer didn’t waver as he got older....

Related Links


Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012

Read entire article at AARP Blog