Editing Stringfellow Barr

{{short description|Founder of Great Books program at St. John's College}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=June 2013}}
{{More citations needed|date=June 2011}}
{{Infobox historian
| birth_date = {{birth-date|January 15, 1897}}
| death_date = {{death date and age|February 3, 1982|January 15, 1897}}
| birth_place = [[Suffolk, Virginia]]
| death_place = [[Alexandria, Virginia]]
}}
'''Stringfellow Barr''' (January 15, 1897 – February 3, 1982) was an American historian, author, and former president of [[St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe)|St. John's College]] in [[Annapolis, Maryland]], where he, together with [[Scott Buchanan]], instituted the [[Great Books]] curriculum.

==Career==
Barr was the editor of ''[[Virginia Quarterly Review]]'' from 1931 to 1937.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.vqronline.org/page.php/prmID/2|title=About VQR|publisher=Virginia Quarterly Review|access-date=2008-06-20|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080611092806/http://www.vqronline.org/page.php/prmID/2|archive-date=June 11, 2008|df=mdy-all}}</ref> He established and was president of the [[Foundation for World Government]] from 1948 to 1958. In the 1950s he taught classics at [[Rutgers University]].

Barr wrote compact yet lucid historical surveys of three major periods of western history. Two of his books, ''[[The Will of Zeus]]'' and ''[[The Mask of Jove]]'' deal with the Greeks and Romans, respectively. He also wrote ''[[The Pilgrimage of Western Man]]'', dealing with western history from the Renaissance through the early post-World War II era.<ref>Barr, Stringfellow. ''The Pilgrimage of Western Man''. Westport Connecticut:  Greenwood Press, Publishers,  1974.  Originally published in 1962 by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, New York as KB-45 of Keystone Books. Originally copyrighted in 1949 by Stringfellow Barr. This title is currently (2012) out of print.</ref>

His nickname was "Winkie."{{ref|time}}

In a 1951 ''[[New York Post]]'' column, [[Arthur Schlesinger Jr.]] mocked Barr as belonging to the "solve-the-Russian-problem-by-giving-them-money school," along with [[Carey McWilliams (journalist)|Carey McWilliams]] and [[Thomas I. Emerson|Thomas Emerson]].<ref>{{Cite news |last=Navasky |first=Victor |date=2007-03-08 |title=Schlesinger & The Nation |url=https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/schlesinger-nation/ |access-date=2024-05-27 |work=The Nation |language=en-US |issn=0027-8378}}</ref> Schlesinger said of them, "None of these gentlemen is a Communist, but none of them objects very much to Communism. They are the [[Typhoid Mary]]s of the left, bearing the germs of the infection even if not suffering obviously from the disease."{{ref|navasky}}

Barr's views on the poor quality of American education and an American society driven by consumerist ideology are presented in ironic terms in ''[[Purely Academic]]'' (1958), a classic academic novel set in an anonymous Corn Belt university during the McCarthy period, as when a character in the story says that

:Many observers here and abroad note a kind of higher illiteracy in our college graduates. But we like it that way. In our cars we like horsepower; in our studies we like slow-motion and low-gear. In education the intellectually second-rate does not shock us. To insist on the first-rate would be arrogant. Anyhow, if we are so second-rate, how come we are the richest nation in recorded history and the fattest people on earth?<ref>New York: Simon and Schuster, page 19</ref>

In 1959, Barr was one of a number of signatories to a petition asking the U. S. Congress to abolish the [[House Committee on Unamerican Activities]]. Other notable signatories included [[Eleanor Roosevelt]] and [[Reinhold Niebuhr]].

Barr wrote ''The Kitchen Garden Book''  (New York: Viking Press, 1956) with Stella Standard.  The ''Kitchen Garden'' is a manual on growing and cooking common vegetables.

''[[The New York Times|New York Times]]'' reviewer [[Edmund Fuller]] called his 1958 novel, ''Purely Academic,'' "bitterly hilarious," "sadistically satirical," and "funny and appalling."{{ref|fuller}}

Barr died on February 3, 1982.<ref> https://www.nytimes.com/1982/02/05/obituaries/stringfellow-barr-educator-dies-pressed-study-of-100-great-books.html</ref>

==Notes==
#{{note|time}} "[https://time.com/archive/6823283/colonist/ Colonist]", Time Magazine, August 19, 1946.
#{{note|navasky}} Navasky, Victor, 1980; ''Naming Names''; p.&nbsp;54 of the 2003 reprint by Hill and Wang; {{ISBN|0-8090-0183-7}}

==See also==
*[[Liberal Arts, Inc.]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}
#Barr, Stringfellow. ''American National Biography''. 2:222–224 (1999)
#{{note|fuller}} Edward Fuller, "In the Groves of Academe Without a Compass," The New York Times January 5, 1958, p. BR4

==External links==
{{Wikiquote}}
* [http://digital.library.pitt.edu/cgi-bin/f/findaid/findaid-idx?c=ascead;cc=ascead;q1=SC.1952.01;rgn=main;view=text;didno=US-PPiU-sc195201 Hervey Allen Papers, 1831-1965, SC.1952.01, Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh]

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Barr, Stringfellow}}
[[Category:1897 births]]
[[Category:1982 deaths]]
[[Category:20th-century American novelists]]
[[Category:20th-century American male writers]]
[[Category:Rutgers University faculty]]
[[Category:Historians of the United States]]
[[Category:People from Suffolk, Virginia]]
[[Category:St. John's College (Annapolis/Santa Fe) faculty]]
[[Category:American male novelists]]
[[Category:20th-century American historians]]
[[Category:Novelists from Virginia]]
[[Category:Novelists from New Jersey]]
[[Category:Novelists from Maryland]]
[[Category:Presidents of St. John's College]]
[[Category:American male non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:Historians from Virginia]]
[[Category:20th-century American academics]]