Daniel Joseph Boorstin, leading exponent of the "consensus" view of American history and institutions, was born on 1 October 1914 in Atlanta, Georgia. By the time he was two his father, Samuel Aaron Boorstin, a lawyer, and his mother, Dora Olsan Boorstin, had moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. In this burgeoning Southwestern city still redolent of frontier experiences, his family prospered. His father, who had been brought to America as a child by his Russian-Jewish parents, was a self-made man who worked his way through the University of Georgia, practiced law in Atlanta, and then became a "booster" of Tulsa.

After graduating first in his class at age fifteen from Tulsa Central High School in 1930, Boorstin enrolled as a liberal arts undergraduate at Harvard University. There he majored in English history and literature (one of his teachers being F. O. Matthiessen) and was an editor of the undergraduate daily the Crimson...