Revisiting (yet again) those classics that refuse to die

In 1948 a panel of distinguished Chicagoans held a symposium on one of Plato’s dialogues on the stage of Orchestra Hall and invited the public to attend. What in the world were they thinking? Plato? The public? Epic fail, you figure, right?

Think again. Every seat in the house was filled, and 1,500 people were turned away.

This odd colloquium was part of Great Books Week in the Windy City, an event the like of which it is hard for us even to imagine today. In those days the classics were hot. Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, and all the others who would later be reviled as “dead white men” were for a time there all the rage. Thousands of Great Books reading groups cropped up across America. Celebrities from boxer Gene Tunney to actress Julie Adams (Creature from the Black Lagoon) were caught pawing over the august tomes of Lucretius, Pascal, and Rousseau. The beautiful people jetted out to Colorado for Great Books seminars at the Aspen Institute. Encyclopaedia Britannica published Great Books of the Western World and sold 50,000 copies of the pricey set in one year alone.

And then it ended.

Sales declined, reading groups folded, and everyone, it seemed, went back to watching TV. “The Great Conversation,” as it was called, and as the companion volume (below) to the Great Books is titled, had ended.

What happened? Why did the popularity of the Great Books tank? Or perhaps the proper question is: Why on earth were they so popular in the first place?

Whatever the questions, they’re raised anew by A Great Idea at the Time, by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, a book that explores “The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books” with panache and no small measure of vitriol. Here at Britannica we’ve enjoyed this entertaining and highly readable history of the Great Books movement, even if it does direct considerable snark at some of our corporate forbears, notably Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and William Benton.

This week at the Britannica Blog we’ll revisit the Great Books, those works that New Yorker film critic David Denby termed “indestructible” for their ability to survive eternally, despite censorship, intellectual fashion cycles, and putative irrelevance, to continue giving pleasure and enlightenment to many people in every generation.

We’ve invited an assortment of latter-day Great Bookies to discuss the place of the classics in the world today and probe some of the issues about reading and liberal education that linger fifty years after the height of the Great Books “craze,” as the Wall Street Journal recently called it; and fifteen years, give or take, since the so-called “canon wars” of the eighties and nineties ended, more, it seems, from battle fatigue among the combatants than a decisive victory by either side.

Please tune in each day this week to watch the conversation and, as always, take part in it by leaving comments of your own.

[Reposted from the Britannica Blog]