Clifton Paul “Kip” Fadiman (1904–99) was an American intellectual, author, editor, anthologist, and radio and television personality. He was celebrated for his wide-ranging knowledge and his extraordinary memory.
Born to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, New York City, Fadiman became an avid and voracious reader early in life. After graduating from Columbia, he taught school, served as an editor in the publishing firm of Simon & Schuster, and book editor of The New Yorker magazine 1933–43.
Fadiman was master of ceremonies 1938–48 of the popular radio quiz program Information, Please!, wherein the public asked questions of a panel of “experts.” Fadiman and his panelists (including columnist Franklin P. Adams, journalist John Kieran, and musician Oscar Levant) adopted questions suggested by listeners as opportunities for an exciting display of wit and erudition.
Fadiman was a magazine columnist, a television host, and an essayist at various times. However, he was best known as an anthologist. Among the volumes intended at motivating literature enthusiasts are Reading I’ve Liked (1941,) The American Treasury (1955,) Fantasia Mathematica (1958,) and The World Treasury of Children’s Literature (1984–85.)
Fadiman also wrote Party of One (1955; magazine columns,) Any Number Can Play (1957,) Enter Conversing (1962,) and The Joys of Wine (1975; with Sam Aaron.) An editor and anthologist, he helped put together the multi-volume Great Books of the Western World (1990.)
American essayist Anne Fadiman wrote The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir (2017,) a coming-of-age story written around her father’s oenophilia.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Clifton Fadiman
I think we must quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing.
—Clifton Fadiman
Topics: Quotations
A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
—Clifton Fadiman
Topics: Memory
To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.
—Clifton Fadiman
Topics: Birthdays
A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naive, it may be oversophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.
—Clifton Fadiman
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
—Clifton Fadiman
Topics: Jokes
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
—Clifton Fadiman
Topics: Self-Discovery, Literature, Reading, Books
There are two kinds of writers—the great ones who can give you truths, and the lesser ones, who can only give you themselves.
—Clifton Fadiman
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Joseph Heller American Novelist
Stewart Brand American Writer
Ralph Ellison American Novelist
Norman Cousins American Journalist
Sam Levenson American Humorist
Isaac Asimov American Novelist, Critic, Popular Scientist
Ashley Montagu British-American Anthropologist
Robert Bresson French Film Director
David Ogilvy British Advertising Executive
Yehudi Menuhin British Violinist