Renowned as a media scholar and practitioner, Erik Barnouw had a long career that involved work with commercial networks, the federal government, documentary filmmakers, and academe. He is best knowing’s premier historian. 

Origins

  Barnouw was born in the Netherlands and spent his first decade there, moving with his family to New York after World War I. He became very active in theater while attending Princeton ​​University from 1925 to 1929, and wrote and acted in several plays and musicals, including Open Collars and the Princeton Triangle Show. On graduation he turned down a chance to stay on for graduate degrees and become a faculty member, opting instead for the theater world. The theater was one of three offers he considered; in the end, Barnouw was luckily able to enjoy all three of them. The theater stint lasted only a few months, and he then accepted a position as a writer for the new business monthly magazine Fortune. When the Depression began to cut into that option (first his hours were reduced, then he lost his job), he turned to the third-a fellowship to travel overseas. The fellowship included a few months of his studying drama with Max Reinhardt in Vienna, plus travel to other spots in Europe and North Africa. On Barnouw's return in 1931, he found an America that had plunged even deeper into the Depression and that offered few job opportunities of any sort.

Radio Years

     A chance meeting led to a position with the Erwin Wasey ad agency, which had just won the Camel Cigarettes radio advertising account. Barnouw was assigned to direct the Camel Quarter Hour program, both the program and its advertising. This variety show was broadcast six nights a week. As he later recalled: at that point "I had never had a radio. I went out and bought a radio ... [and) listened to it all weekend, so I could come to work Monday knowing a lot about it." He remained with the Erwin Wasey agency until 1935, then spent two years with the Arthur Kudner agency. By mid-decade he was directing six or seven network (CBS and NBC) radio dramas every week, among them Bobby Benson's Adventures, a 15-minute children's program. Though he had sought a salary of only $30 a week for this job, he was started at $65, an indication of national radio's economic health (despite the perilous times) and growing importance.

     By 1937 Barnouw felt burned-out from the long and hectic weeks dealing with multiple radio programs. A writing professor at Columbia University contacted him while he relaxed in Maine for the summer, and offered him a chance to teach radio writing during the coming academic year. As Barnouw later noted, this was fortuitous timing; the networks were increasing their sustaining (i.e., non-advertiser supported) programs, many of them dramas, in the face of press and government criticism of radio's direction. The networks needed and were willing to help support ways of training writers for the medium; they helped pay tuition for some of the people attending Barnouw's course at Columbia. Among those attending his first class were a young Bernard Malamud and (under an assumed name) novelist Pearl Buck, who had just won a Nobel Prize. Barnouw's first book, Handbook of Radio Writing, was the result of his experiences in this class, it also included scripts from his work with both CBS and NBC.

     Teaching about how to write for radio (something he had deplored before he tried it) increased his interest and activity in writing for radio. He served as script editor for a CBS radio series in 1939-40. He also wrote many Cavalcade of America and Theater Guild on the Air scripts during and after World War II. As many radio employees were being called up for wartime work, Barnouw found himself working full-time again in network radio, becoming a script editor for NBC's public service program writers. As a result of advertisers increasing their expenditures during the war, the number of public service programs also greatly increased; there was plenty for Barnouw to do. The NBC position led to his being appointed the head of educational programs for the Armed Forces Radio Service in Washington, D.C., in 1944-45.

Television and Film

     After the war, Barnouw returned to New York and Columbia University, this time as a full-time faculty member in the School of Arts. Among his first roles was that of bridging academics and network: the university made use of NBC television studios to train writers and production people. He expanded the courses in his department to include television and film as well as radio. He would chair this department until 1968, and he remained with the university until his retirement in 1973.

     What many perceive to have been Barnouw's signature contribution to radio began in 1959 when he was approached by Oxford University Press to prepare a three-volume history of American broadcasting to parallel the history of the BBC that Oxford was planning to publish in England. Barnouw had already scheduled a year (1961) in India on a Fulbright fellowship (out of which came a history of Indian film), but on his return he devoted himself to this project. The first volume appeared in 1966 to laudatory reviews; it was followed by the two further volumes in 1968 and 1970. The trilogy almost overnight became the standard history of U.S. radio and television. He followed up with a one-volume version focused on television in 1975, and revised it twice before his death.

     Barnouw spent the final years of his career in Washington. He became a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center of the Smithsonian Institution in 1976, from which residency came his history of the unique role of American broadcast advertising, The Sponsor, in 1978. From 1978 until his retirement in 1981, Barnouw served as founding chief or director of the Library of Congress's Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Even after he retired, and up until the time of his death in mid-2001, Barnouw continued to write insightful analyses of the state of American media.