When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
-Clifton Fadiman

Though Clifton Fadiman was one of the twentieth century’s foremost critics, essayists, and anthologists, he viewed his primary occupation as reading–or, as he liked to put it, “the odd, parochial mania for decoding black squiggles on white paper.”

Fadiman was born in Brooklyn in 1904, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. He taught himself how to read at the age of four. At seven he read Dickens; at eight he started keeping a set of journals in which he recorded his literary judgments (“Poe is prudish”); at fourteen he read Homer, Sophocles, Dante, and Milton.

At sixteen, Fadiman entered Columbia, where he studied under Mark Van Doren and John Erskine and became part of a legendary undergraduate circle that included Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mortimer Adler. He paid his way through college by washing dishes, waiting tables, running a bookshop, reading Shakespeare’s love sonnets to a retired Wall Street speculator, giving lessons on French symbolist poetry to a blind actress, breaking in pipes for wealthy smokers, guiding disoriented customers out of an amusement-park maze, and writing book reviews for The Nation. Fellow undergraduates would crowd into the college elevators with him, hoping to catch a Fadiman bon mot between floors.

When he was twenty-two, he sailed to Europe in order to retrieve his first wife from an Italian baron. He paid for his passage by translating two volumes of Nietzsche during the ten-day voyage, holing up in the third-class bar with a glass of beer and a German dictionary. Eighty years later, one of those translations–The Birth of Tragedy–is still in print.

Fadiman became the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster at twenty-eight and the book critic of The New Yorker at twenty-nine. (He preferred to call himself a “reviewer,” remarking that “my colleagues and myself are often called critics, a consequence of the amiable national trait that turns Kentuckians into colonels and the corner druggist into Doc.”) He praised Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis but had little use for Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner. In one of his most notorious reviews, he wrote:

"Even those who call Mr. Faulkner our greatest literary sadist do not fully appreciate him, for it is not merely his characters who have to run the gauntlet but also his readers. One does not so much finish Sanctuary as come through it in good shape. I have frequently felt that the publishers are missing a sure bet in not arranging to have every emergent Faulknerian met by a brandy-bearing St. Bernard."

In 1937, a radio producer happened to hear Fadiman deliver a lecture on American literature at the New School for Social Research and realized he had found the perfect master of ceremonies for a new quiz show he was planning. Information Please became so popular that 15,000 listeners sent in questions each week. The right answer wasn’t important; what mattered was the witty riposte. Decades later, when a reporter remarked on the show’s educational value, Fadiman said, “That’s preposterous. I was on it for years and I didn’t learn a thing.” His intention, he explained, was “to use the questions and answers as an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation.”

Fadiman’s long shelf of books includes three essay collections, Party of One, Any Number Can Play, and Enter Conversing; a guide to classic literary works, The Lifetime Reading Plan; and more than twenty anthologies, among them two on mathematics. He also wrote four children’s books, of which the best-known is Wally the Wordworm, the story of a bibliophilic worm who, unsatisfied by the “short, flat, bare, dull, poor, thin” words he finds in picture books, joyfully eats his way through a dictionary from abracadabra to zymurgy. Fadiman once said that he liked children’s literature “because small children are the only people on earth who haven’t done a goddamn thing to hurt the human race.” In order to compile his three-volume World Treasury of Children’s Literature, he acquired a child-level knowledge of Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish in his seventies. (He was already fluent in French and German.) He also helped found Cricket, a literary magazine for children, and wrote the entry on children’s literature for the Encyclopædia Britannica, of whose board of editors he was a longtime member.

Fadiman spent more than half a century on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club, longer than any other judge. Though a persistent advocate for literary merit, he was never snobbish about the bottom line. Of his fellow board member Henry Seidel Canby, who was excessively fond of nature books, he once said, “Dr. Canby would rather choose a book about a bee than about a man, which would be all right if our membership were made up of bees, but we only have a small number of bees–not enough to make any money out of them.” During his years at the Book-of-the-Month Club he championed such books as Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine; and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Of Catcher in the Rye, he wrote in the Club newsletter, “Read five pages; you are inside Holden’s mind, almost as incapable of escaping from it as Holden himself. . . . That rare miracle of fiction has again come to pass: a human being has been created out of ink, paper, and the imagination.”

After books, Fadiman’s favorite things were wine (the subject of an essay called “Brief History of a Love Affair”), cheese (“milk’s leap toward immortality”), and cigars (he preferred long, thin panatelas, about which he wrote, “As I am, alas, neither long nor thin, my preference for the shape must be compensatory”). Although he eventually gave up cigars, he never gave up wine and cheese. And of course he never gave up books, not even after he lost most of his sight at the age of eighty-nine. With the help of his wife, Annalee Whitmore Jacoby Fadiman, a former MGM screenwriter and Time-Life war correspondent, he learned to operate a device from the Library of Congress that enabled him to listen to recorded books. In 1993, a few months after he became blind, he received the National Book Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, delivering his acceptance speech without notes. He helped compile his last anthology, World Poetry, of which he was co-editor, by listening to its contents on tape. He continued to serve as a Book-of-the-Month Club judge, listening to recorded manuscripts and dictating his responses until two months before his death in 1999 at the age of ninety-five.

By that point he had read well over 25,000 books. The ones he had reread most often were the classics he discussed in The Lifetime Reading Plan. In 1960, in his introduction to its first edition, he had written: “They can be a major experience, a source of continuous internal growth. Once part of you, they work in and on and with you until you die.”