A phrase from Mario Vargas Llosa comes to mind: “those of us who did not attend his classes and yet feel ourselves to be his students.” He is writing of Isaiah Berlin and the many who are indebted to him — whether they ever met Berlin, in the flesh, or not. You will find Vargas Llosa’s discussion of Berlin, and other influences on him, in his book The Call of the Tribe.

Among Van Doren’s students, in the flesh, were Lionel Trilling, Thomas Merton, Whittaker Chambers, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Podhoretz, John Berryman, Jack Kerouac, Meyer Schapiro, John Hollander, and Jeffrey Hart.

Bill Clinton styled himself “The Man from Hope” (for he was born in Hope, Ark.), and Van Doren was another. He was born in Hope, Ill. (a dot on the map in Vermilion County). He studied at the University of Illinois and then at Columbia, in New York. He would make his career at Columbia, teaching.

Another professor of English, Charles W. Everett, wrote the following about him:

Dr. Johnson said of Burke that a stranger meeting him in a shed where both were taking refuge from the rain would go away feeling that he had met an extraordinary man. That is the first and major effect produced by Van Doren, all the more for his own insistence that he has in him nothing of the extraordinary, that anybody can understand anything he wishes to, that anybody can teach great literature and philosophy.

Van Doren was known by a wider public, too. As David Lehman tells us in the foreword I have mentioned, Van Doren edited an anthology of poetry that sold so well, he was able to buy for his family a house on Bleecker Street, in the Village. Lehman further offers this: Van Doren was “one of the experts discussing great literature on Invitation to Learning, a half-hour radio show that aired on Tuesday evenings starting in 1941.”

That show was a hit. Do you think something like it would be possible today? Would the public want it?