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
Clifton Fadiman was one of the twentieth century's foremost critics, essayists, and anthologists, but he viewed his primary occupation as reading. Fadiman was born in Brooklyn in 1904, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. 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. While at Columbia he began writing book reviews for The Nation.
Fadiman became the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster at twenty-eight and the book critic of The New Yorker at twenty-nine. He became the moderator of a popular radio quiz show, Information Please, which first aired in 1938.
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. 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 Encyclopaedia 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. 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.
In 1993, a few months after he became blind, Fadiman 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."