Passings, from A to Z

2010 January 28
by Ellen Noonan

Let us pause this morning to tip our hats to two writers who died yesterday. Their books couldn’t have been further apart from each other in style and subject matter: one scrutinized society at the top, the other championed the stories of those on the bottom.

<em>Tales of Manhattan</em>, a short story collection by Louis Auchincloss, published in 1967.

Tales of Manhattan, a short story collection by Louis Auchincloss, published in 1967.

Louis Auchincloss was born in 1917 into the ranks of New York’s highest society and went on to both fulfill and unveil its norms and expectations. Alongside a long career as a trusts and estates lawyer, he also wrote numerous novels and short stories, the best of which left readers with memorable characters and a clear-eyed accounting of the manners and morals of the WASP axis that stretched from the Upper East Side through New England. Auchincloss embodied old New York, with a regal bearing and distinctive accent; to hear him speak (as I did at a Gotham Center event years ago) was to be transported to an earlier time.

The most recent edition of Howard Zinn's influential book.

The most recent edition of Howard Zinn's influential book.

The career of Howard Zinn, born five years later across the East River in Brooklyn, took him first to a PhD in History from Columbia and then to the faculties of Spelman College and Boston University, where he urged his students to social activism and mightily irritated university administrators. He published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, a single volume that told a radically different story of U.S. history than traditional textbooks did at the time. If the broad strokes and unabashed romanticization of working-class struggle that characterize A People’s History make many historians wince (ASHP’s own Who Built America? textbook, for example, deliberately offers a more warts-and-all telling of similar stories), the book has been hugely influential in bringing social history to people who tuned out of boring high school history classes. Over and over again, when I tell someone what I do for a living, their eyes light up and they tell me about reading A People’s History.

The recently launched Zinn Education Project website is a useful companion site for the book, with materials and teaching suggestions.

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