Daniel J. Boorstin

News Obituary Article

WASHINGTON: D. Boorstin, 89, historian, Pulitzer winner

By TOM BENNETT

Distinguished Atlanta native Daniel J. Boorstin was a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian and a 12-year librarian of Congress.

Memorial service plans for Dr. Boorstin, 89, of Washington, who died of pneumonia Saturday at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, will be announced.

Dr. Boorstin, who was Jewish, left Atlanta at 2. His father was one of the lawyers who unsuccessfully defended Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager who was convicted of the 1913 murder of a 13-year-old girl.

After Mr. Frank's sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was abducted from a state prison farm and lynched in 1915. After the lynching, an estimated half of the city's Jews moved away. Among them were the Boorstins, who moved to Tulsa, Okla.

Dr. Boorstin, one of the nation's great men of letters, wrote more than 20 books. He preferred people, experiences and inventions over ideology as shapers of history, according to Contemporary Authors.

'The Americans'

His masterpiece is the three-volume series "The Americans," published between 1958 and 1973 and commenting upon aspects of U.S. history from the Puritans to the moon landing. It swept the major book awards, and the third volume, "The Democratic Experience," was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1974.

"The Discoverers," about man's search for knowledge about all phenomena, also earned critical success. Its companion volume, "The Creators," was published in 1992.

The Harvard summa cum laude graduate and Rhodes scholar never took a course in American history, he told Contemporary Authors. Dr. Boorstin had an extraordinary series of jobs which gave him unlimited access to research, adding a treasure of detail to his books.

He had been a history professor at the University of Chicago, senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution and librarian of Congress, appointed by President Gerald Ford, until his retirement in 1987. Congress created for him the post of librarian of Congress emeritus.

Established in 1800, the Library of Congress is the world's largest library. During his tenure, its holdings grew to 84 million items including 30 million books and 535 miles of shelves. He made the items more accessible, doubling the number of annual visitors, and appeared in TV commercials to combat illiteracy.

"For each of us, reading remains a private, uniquely qualitative nook of our life," he told The New York Times in 1987. "As readers, then, we are refugees from the flood of contemporaneous mathematicized homogeneity. With a book, we are at home with ourselves."

He was "high-profile, at home in the Washington social circles," according to Current Biography. On weekends, he and his wife and editor, the writer and poet Ruth Frankel Boorstin, escaped from the capital to their nine-acre farm on the banks of the Potomac in Maryland.

His wife, Dr. Boorstin told Contemporary Authors, was his intellectual companion, editor and critic. "I don't think I could have done my work without her," he said.

Dr. Boorstin became a hero of U.S. conservatives in October 1968 when he wrote an essay in Esquire magazine titled "The New Barbarians," in which he denounced student anti-Vietnam War demonstrators.

The students responded by calling him a hypocrite; he had, in fact, been a member of the Communist Party in 1938-39. However, he had renounced his party membership, he said, after Joseph Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. In 1953, Dr. Boorstin appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and supplied the names of fellow party members.

Harvard at age 15

Daniel Joseph Boorstin was the son of Samuel Aaron and Dora Olsan Boorstin of Atlanta. His grandparents on both sides of the family were Russian Jewish immigrants. In Tulsa, to which his family fled, he was high school valedictorian and entered Harvard at 15.

He received a Rhodes scholarship and entered Balloil College, Oxford University. During Christmas and spring vacations, he traveled in Europe and lived for a time in Florence.

Choosing law for a career, he received two bachelor's degrees from Oxford and was admitted to the English bar. Upon his return to the United States, he earned a doctor of juridical science degree from Yale. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar, practiced law for a few months, and served as a senior attorney in the office of the wartime Lend-Lease Administration.

Survivors other than his wife are sons Paul Boorstin and Jonathan Boorstin, both of Los Angeles, and David Boorstin of New York; and six grandchildren.

© 2004 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution