Earl Shorris

25 J–27 M

Earl Shorris (Chicago, June 25, 1936 – New York City, May 27, 2012) was an American writer and social critic. He is best known for establishing the Clemente Course in the Humanities. From Alexander Nazaryan, The Harper's Blog (Harper's Magazine), 19 Mar 2013: The common archetype is of a reformer full in his youth of resplendent visions that lose luster with time, so that in his senescence he grows bitter, convinced that progress is an illusion. Shorris was a rejoinder to that trope. Born in Chicago and raised in New Mexico, he enrolled at the age of thirteen in the University of Chicago, where college president Robert Maynard Hutchins, in love with the Great Books, was preaching that “the best education for the best is the best education for us all.” From there, Shorris headed to Mexico, where he became (among other ventures) a bullfighter. Later yet, he went to work in advertising, climbing the ranks at N. W. Ayer & Sons. The image of the stocky Shorris mingling with the Don Drapers of the day seems to me incongruous, as it may have to him. Indeed, books like The Oppressed Middle: Politics of Middle Management (1981) and A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture (1994) show an exasperation with the late-stage capitalism whose servant Shorris had somehow become. Viniece Walker changed all that, turning Shorris from a critic of American culture to a champion of those whom that culture had largely discarded. If that seems a little grandiose,

17 books in the database