Bazelon, David T., 1923-

Social critic David T. Bazelon was one of the “New York Intellectuals” whose work appeared in journals like Commentary, Partisan Review, Dissent, and Politics in the years following the Second World War. Throughout his career, Bazelon was associated with writers and intellectuals like James T. Farrell, Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, and others. He was born in 1923 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and grew up in Milwaukee and Chicago. Bazelon briefly attended the Universities of Illinois, Virginia, and Chicago before graduating from Columbia University in 1949. He taught at Bard College for a year and then enrolled in the Yale School of Law (LL.B., 1953). From 1953 – 1958, Bazelon worked as a corporate attorney in New York City. Bazelon quit his law practice in 1958 in order to devote himself to writing. He assisted his uncle, the federal judge David L. Bazelon, with research and writing for speeches and articles from 1959 until 1965, and worked briefly as a writer and interviewer for ABC’s Mike Wallace Interview Show during the late 1950s. Bazelon was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. (1963 – 1965), visiting professor at Rutgers Law School (1965 - 1967), and a Guggenheim fellow (1967 – 1968). In 1969 Bazelon joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo, retiring as Professor of Policy Studies and English in 1985. Bazelon was married three times and had a son, Coleman, by his second marriage.

At every stage of his careers, Bazelon thought of himself first as a writer. Beginning in 1943 with book reviews in The New Republic and The New York Times Book Review, Bazelon contributed more than a hundred articles, reviews, stories, and poems to periodicals including Commentary, Reporter, Partisan Review, New Leader, and Dissent . He was an early contributor to Dwight MacDonald’s influential journal, Politics . Although Bazelon’s initial interest was in writing fiction and poetry, his earliest success came from his essays and reviews, and he established his reputation as a social critic. Bazelon continued to write fiction, much of it autobiographical, as well as poetry throughout his career, most of which remained unpublished. Bazelon also gave speeches in academic, professional, and civic venues and contributed to a number of conferences. He wrote the script for the 1964 documentary Point of Order about Joseph McCarthy, and contributed liner notes for Columbia Records releases.

Bazelon published three books: The Paper Economy (1963), Power in America (1967), and Nothing But a Fine Tooth Comb (1970). The Paper Economy was an analysis of the corporation and its relation to the structure of the American economy. It was listed by the American Library Association as one of its fifty notable books of 1963. In Power in America, Bazelon took up the ideas of Milovan Djilas and John Kenneth Galbraith to examine the growing power of intellectuals in American society. Publication of the book was a seminal moment in the discussion of the idea of a “New Class” that culminated in the “New Class Study” and subsequent publication of the volume The New Class? (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1979). Bazelon served as an advisor to the project. Nothing But a Fine Tooth Comb, Bazelon’s third book, collected many of the essays and reviews he had published in periodicals together with previously unpublished material and new introductory material and an epilogue written for the book.

The course of Bazelon’s literary and professional careers is discussed and documented in the extensive collection of letters contained in the David T. Bazelon Papers. He met the future novelist and film-writer Calder Willingham at the University of Virginia and the two young writers carried on an extensive correspondence during the years 1941 – 1944 in which they discussed their ideas about writing and their plans for work. During the same period, Bazelon wrote to the novelist James T. Farrell soliciting advice on pursuing a writing career and the older novelist responded with a series of letters, from 1942 through 1944. Bazelon also corresponded extensively with Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, and Dwight MacDonald in both personal and professional capacities. Other significant correspondents include his uncle, Judge David L. Bazelon, the sociologist David Riesman, and the peace activist Robert Pickus, another early friend from his time at the University of Chicago.

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2004. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hill, Mich.: The Gale Group, 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC. Accessed 11 Aug. 2004 Other information derived from the collection.

From the guide to the David T. Bazelon papers, 1935–1994, 1942–1985, (University of Delaware Library - Special Collections)