The Multi-Talented Mr.Erskine - Shaping Mass Culture through Great Books and Fine Music

Best-selling novelist, popular concert pianist, Hollywood script writer, radio personality, celebrity professor, society figure in New York and Paris, and magnet for women from Ana?s Nin to Helen Gahagan - John Erskine, early twentieth century bon vivant, was a true American original. Beyond the headlines, however, he also left a lasting influence on American intellectual and artistic culture as the father of the Great Books curriculum, the founder of a university in France, the first president of The Juilliard School of Music, and a profoundly skilled teacher of English literature at Columbia University. His balancing act among multiple identities, underscored by his commitment to create access for the middle class to highbrow culture, is the subject of this, the first biography of an influential, unforgettable educator and public intellectual.