Abstract
Mortimer Adler helped Britannica’s sales crew and potential male buyers of their wares with another spicy Playboy article in 1965. Titled “The Not-So-Classic Classics,” his piece shared Playboy’s pages with Shel Silverstein, Woody Allen (again), Ray Bradbury, and centerfold Sally Duberson. Adler sought to promote the great books idea with an ironic confession: namely, that some classics “bored” him. He called those less-than-scintillating works “a rogues’ gallery of famous books” and mere “so-called classics.” Adler kept great books promoters’ and salesmen’s interests in mind, however, by avoiding any references to Britannica’s Great Books.1 He would attempt to sell Britannica by explaining what it was not. The piece underscored the cultural strength of great books idea by risking a look at it in negative terms. But the article also continued the implicit theme of the great books’ accessibility from his 1963 Playboy piece.
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Notes
Ibid.; Mortimer J. Adler, Philosopher at Large (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 227.
David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 192;
James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States,1945–1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 526–527, 623–624, 668, 745;
Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press/ Perseus Books, 2001), 8–9;
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956). 5.
James Sloan Allen, The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 57; Adler, Philosopher, 262–268;
Adler, Second Look in the Rearview Mirror (New York: Macmillan, 1992), chapter 6 passim.
Adler, Second Look, 259. An abridged essay by McInerny is reprinted in Second Look from Michael D. Torre’s edited collection, Freedom in the Modern World: Jacques Maritain, Yves R. Simon, Mortimer J. Adler (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press/American Maritain Society, 1989).
Adler, Philosopher, 281–282, 318–321; Epstein, 31; Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 32; UCSC/MJAP, Box 53, Folder: “Caroline Press” (clippings).
Otto A. Bird and Thomas Musial, “Great Books Programs: The Rationale of Great Books Education,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, (eds.) Allen Kent, Harold Lancour, and Jay E. Daily, Vol. 10 (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1973), 175; “Great Books Discussions Turn Over a New Page,” Chicago Tribune, September 30, 1962, A14; Mary Merryfield, “They Learn to Think—And Like It!” Chicago Tribune, April 22, 1962, F3; Joan Beck, “Junior Version of Great Books Under Way,” Chicago Tribune, October 2, 1962, A1; Joan Beck, “Great Books for Children,” October 4, 1962, C17.
Dwight Macdonald, Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), 59, 243–261; Adler, Philosopher at Large, 258;
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 175. The New Yorker review was published on November 29, 1952.
Henry Grunwald, One Man’s America: A Journalist’s Search for the Heart of His Country (New York: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1997), 332–333 (italics mine); Adler, Philosopher, 322; Adler, Second Look, 200, 293–294.
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958);
William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956);
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 1955);
Richard E. Gordon, Katherine K. Gordon, and Max Gunther, The Split-Level Trap (New York: B. Geis Associates/Random House, 1961);
David Riesman, with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
Rubin, Middlebrow, 189–191; Alex Beam, A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books (New York: Public Affairs, 2008).
Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect, and the American University, 1945–1995,” in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, (ed.) Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 25; Cremin, 250, 555, 715.
Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 28, 87, 144.
Terry Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 188;
William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), chapter 11 passim; James Patterson, Grand Expectations, chapter 22 passim;
Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press/Perseus Books, 2001), 4;
Robinson, “Black Power Nationalism as Ethnic Pluralism: Postwar Liberalism’s Ethnic Paradigm in Black Radicalism,” in Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought, (eds.) Adolph Reed, Jr., and Kenneth W. Warren (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2010), 184–214.
Mortimer J. Adler, “The Great Books of 2066,” Playboy 13, no. 1 (January 1966): 137, 224–226, 228.
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© 2013 Tim Lacy
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Lacy, T. (2013). “Mixing Vice and Virtue”: Adler, Britannica’s Cottage Industry, and Mid-Century Anxiety. In: The Dream of a Democratic Culture. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137042620_5
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