But in the autumn of 1956 this charming, gifted young man was merely one of numberless would-be contestants gravitating toward midtown Manhattan, the quiz-show capital of a quiz-crazed country. It would come to seem the symptom of a deep moral rot in the nation largely because of Van Doren himself. From this innocuous impulse flowed a complex moral tale.īy 1959 a boiling scandal would rage with terrifying fury around the tall, lanky figure of Charles Lincoln Van Doren.
So why not try to get on one of those new television quiz shows? If he happened to get lucky, he might win a few thousand dollars. He could use some extra money Columbia University paid him meagerly enough to teach English alongside his famous father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren. In October 1956 the twenty-nine-year-old scion of an illustrious American literary family took up a suggestion that countless Americans were then making to their more erudite friends and relations.
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