Clifton Fadiman came to radio not from newspapers, vaudeville, or Hollywood but from the outwardly quieter world of book and periodical writing, editing, and publishing. As the master of ceremonies of Information, Please and other programs between 1938 and the mid-1950s, he used his knowing tone, witty repartee, and fondness for punning to become an appealing advocate of culture, learning, and civilized conversation for the World War II and postwar generations.

     Fadiman learned the pleasures of knowledge at an early age. His older brother Edwin taught him to read when he was four, and before his teen years he was absorbing Milton, Homer, Dante, and other classic writers. To support himself during high school and college, he pieced together many jobs, beginning with mixing sodas in his father's Brooklyn drug store and then simultaneously reporting, selling ads, distributing copies, and otherwise helping with his brother's Long Island newspaper. He became a book reviewer for The Nation at age 17, and during his Columbia University days he was a ship's chandler, a bookseller, and a paid breaker-in of wealthier students' smoking pipes. By the time he finished his A.B. degree in 1925, he had gained direct experience of popular taste in many fields.

     After two years of high school teaching, Fadiman joined Simon and Schuster in 1927, and as general editor there from 1929 to 1935 he made a number of shrewd publication choices that produced best-sellers. At the same time, he lectured at the People's Institute of New York and participated in many public forums, one of which would have a direct bearing on his radio career several years later. In 19 34, when he assumed the editorship of The New Yorker's book review page, he also had his first taste of sustained radio work as an on-air book reviewer for WJZ, but that stint lasted only six months. His best radio days were still to come.

     In 1938 Dan Golenpaul, a creator of informational radio programs, was brooding over conventional quiz shows, which regularly dragged audience members to the microphone and exposed the shallowness of their knowledge. Golenpaul outlined a fresh approach: invite the public to send in questions to test a panel of experts. In choosing a master of ceremonies, Golenpaul recalled Clifton Fadiman's crisp contribution to a New School for Social Research radio forum on modem literature a few years earlier. Invited to lead the new quiz, Fadiman teasingly framed the questions for a panel gathered to record an audition disc. After some network doubts about public interest, Information, Please (titled after telephone operators' then-customary greeting) was first heard on 17 May 1938 on National Broadcasting Company (NBC) Blue. An unexpected hit, it rose to an estimated peak listenership of more than 9 million during its decade on the air and made Clifton Fadiman a popular icon of the intellectual establishment.

     While producer Golenpaul battled sponsors' intrusions and brushed aside network directives, Fadiman tweaked the chemistry of the panel, which included newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams, sportswriter and naturalist John Kiernan, and pianist Oscar Levant. The fourth chair, like the third one when Levant was absent in alternate weeks, was reserved for guest panelists from a wide range of performers, authors, statesmen, and athletes. Fadiman introduced the questions in a tone of mock menace, offering (as a 1941 review put it) an "ingratiating personality, with its intriguing dash of affable arrogance." Seldom missing an opening for a pun, he called Othello's killing of Desdemona an instance of "smother love," and when correspondent John Gunther correctly identified Reza Pahlavi as Iran's head of state, Fadiman pressed the question with "Are you shah?" while Gunther counterpunned, "Sultanly." Years after the program left the air, Fadiman confided that the questions and answers were only "an armature on which to build a sculpture of genuine conversation."

     Clifton Fadiman fronted other programs, too. He and composer-conductor Morton Gould led the win-the-war entertainment show Keep 'Em Rolling on Mutual in 1941-42, and from 1954 to 1956 he hosted NBC's sustaining Conversa-

tion with author-publisher Bennett Cerf and panel guests. In 1955 he was named a "communicator" for NBC's weekend program Monitor. His television contributions included This Is Show Business and a short-lived attempt to bring Information, Please to the newer medium. 

     After the mid-1950s, Fadiman largely focused on literary interests. He had been a board member and reviewer for the Book-of-the-Month Club since 1944, and he remained on its board of directors for more than 50 years. Begun in 1949, his "Party of One" column appeared in Holiday magazine for a decade. He especially valued his essay on children's literature for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and he continued to assemble anthologies and to write books and essays urging the public to know the pleasures of books, wine, and mathematics. 

     This man of wit and prodigious memory was genially satirized as the Duffy's Tavern habitue Clifton Finnegan, who seemed almost too stupid to breathe. In the intellectually gritty 1950s, Dwight MacDonald more somberly dismissed Fadiman as a "midcult" peddler of learning to unwashed masses, and more recently critic John Leonard bemoaned Fadiman's "philistine" failure to appreciate William Faulkner's novels. Several generations of readers have been grateful, however, for Fadiman's invitations to learning in Reading I've Liked and The Lifetime Reading Plan, and listeners to Information, Please and Conversation discovered that knowledge and wit could be both gratifying and greatly entertaining.

     Although the arc of Fadiman 's career began and ended in writing and publishing, the middle span made a notable contribution to radio's upward aspirations. In fact, he was most valuable to radio precisely because he was not from radio, and for those who wished to condemn broadcasting as merely a noisy, empty-minded enterprise, Clifton Fadiman remained a hard nut to crack.