Charles van doren obituary

Charles van doren father
Van doren family
Charles van doren movie

•

Charles Van Doren, central figure in 1950s quiz show scandal, dies at 93

Charles Van Doren, one of the first intellectual stars of the television era as a contestant on the NBC show “Twenty One,” who quickly became the country’s leading villain after admitting that his winning streak on the popular game show had been rigged, died Tuesday. He was 93.

As many as 50 million Americans tuned in to watch who they thought were ordinary people hitting it big on the show. But in fact “Twenty One” had been scripted down to the dramatic pauses and theatrical stutters as Van Doren “struggled” to recall the answers that producers had fed him beforehand.

In a 90-minute confession before a congressional committee, the charismatic Van Doren — whose popularity in the late 1950s had been compared to Elvis Presley’s — admitted, “I have deceived my friends, and I had millions of them.”

The fallout was nothing short of a morality play acted out on a national stage.

President Eisenhower called the deception “a terrible thing to do to the American public.” The writer John Steinbeck raged against “t

•

Charles Van Doren, scion of one of America’s premier intellectual and literary families, died on April 9, 2019, at the age of 93. His father, Mark Van Doren, was a Pulitzer Prize winner, poet, literary critic, and professor of English at Columbia University. His mother, Dorothy Van Doren, was a novelist and editor. His uncle, Carl Van Doren, was a professor of literature, historian, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in biography.

Charles graduated from Manhattan High School of Music and Art, served in the Army Air Force for two years, graduated with honors from St. John’s College in Annapolis (famed for its Great Books curriculum), earned a Masters degree in Mathematics from Columbia at 23, studied at Cambridge University and the Sorbonne, began teaching at Columbia in 1955, and earned his doctorate in literature there in 1959. Charles Van Doren was born, raised and educated to be a major figure in the academic and literary communities of New York and the United States.

This life story was not to be. As several obituaries published in major newspapers emphasized, Van Doren upended his

•

Charles Van Doren

American writer and editor (1926–2019)

Charles Lincoln Van Doren (February 12, 1926 – April 9, 2019)^[1] was an American writer and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the NBC quiz show Twenty-One. Terminated by NBC, he joined Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. in 1959, becoming a vice-president and writing and editing many books before retiring in 1982.

Background

Charles Van Doren was born in New York City, the elder son of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, critic and professor Mark Van Doren and novelist Dorothy Van Doren (née Graffe), and a nephew of critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Carl Van Doren. He graduated from the High School of Music & Art in New York, and earned a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts (1946) from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, as well as an M.A. in astrophysics (1949) and a Ph.D. in English (1955), both at Columbia University. He was also a