What does it mean to be American? Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century, spent a lifetime pondering that question. And many people thought he came as close to anyone to providing answers that captured the nuances of that existential question. But as his son, novelist and filmmaker Jon Boorstin, reveals in The American, the nation's story-and his father's story-is far more complicated.
As the twelfth Librarian of Congress and University of Chicago professor, Boorstin won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for the half-million words he wrote about being American and authored another trilogy about the history of humanity (The Discoverers, The Creators, and The Seekers). Yet he wrote just nine pages about himself. While his histories were embraced by readers for his celebration of frontier optimism and America's infinite capacity for hope, his own story suggests a more complicated truth-about humanity and America. In searching for the America that shaped Daniel J. Boorstin, Jon confronts the story Daniel never told. A true story about fathers and sons, about Jews and race, and the price of becoming an American.
Daniel grew up living the kind of history he didn't write about. His father, Sam, was a Jew from Georgia, a would-be Southern Gentleman and good friend and legal counsel to Leo Frank, who was lynched in America's most notorious antisemitic incident. Sam fled Atlanta with his family to another unlikely Jewish home: Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was then just becoming the self-proclaimed oil capital of the world. There Sam lived through the infamous Tulsa Massacre in 1921. Jon describes how despite these tragedies, Sam Boorstin's booster spirit and his idiosyncratic morality combined to shape Daniel's gilded views of America and Americans. Jon also explores his father's lifelong friendship with distinguished Black historian, John Hope Franklin, a fellow Tulsan. Both of whom were unwavering proponents of the American Dream in the face of extraordinary prejudice.
Part biography, part family history, and a crucial extension of his father's work, Jon Boorstin illuminates what we might learn from what was left out. And how, during another challenging time for America, we may renew our own faith in the future.
