SOURCE: "Classics and Commercials: John Erskine and 'Great Books'," in The Making of Middle/Brow Culture, The University of North Carolina Press, 1992, pp. 149-97.

In the following excerpt, Rubin chronicles Erskine's career, and explores the means by which his student Mortimer Adler developed the "Great Books" series.

In July 1915 Randolph Bourne, who had graduated from Columbia University two years earlier, contributed to the New Republic a sketch entitled "The Professor." Part of Bourne's call for a rebellion of youth against the genteel tradition, the essay depicted a figure who supplied his students with knowledge and inspiration but refused to commit himself openly to aesthetic or political judgments. In that tone of subtle, devastating sarcasm of which he was a master, Bourne described his subject's deepest experiences as literary ones, implicitly trivializing them as encounters that had no real consequences. Encapsulated in his study, the professor rejected the "futile...