The Philolexian Foundation

As an undergraduate at King's College in the mid-1770s, Hamilton formed a literary club to debate the great issues of the day, almost all of which came down to what to do about the British. That literary lineage, interrupted by the Revolutionary War and restarted at the newly renamed Columbia afterward, was formalized by his son James in 1802 as the Philolexian Society. While still a student he published widely read pamphlets successfully advocating for revolution, setting an exacting bar for the prose subsequent Philolexians submit to the Society's literary enterprises, Surgam and Boar's Head, and leaving every modern undergraduate, upon turning in a first Lit Hum essay, to wonder whether they measure up.

Multilingual from childhood, Koo debated in English at Columbia and became editor-in-chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator. Editor-in-chief of the Columbia Daily Spectator; B.A. (1908), M.A. (1909), Ph.D. (1912) all at Columbia. Served as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister of Finance, Acting Premier, and briefly Acting President of the Republic of China. The first signature on the United Nations Charter (1945) is his. Closed his career as a judge and Vice-President of the International Court of Justice (1957–1967).

A member of the Columbia College Society for Progress in Letters, the immediate predecessor in the same continuous lineage that would take the name Philolexian in 1802. Later Governor of New York and Vice President under Monroe. The first sitting U.S. Vice President never to have been a member of Congress.

Stephen Watts Kearny (CC 1812) took a commission in 1812, spent the Mexican–American War acquiring American territory at a marching pace, and accomplished the bloodless conquest of New Mexico in nineteen days. He proceeded west and seized California for the United States, the territory that would in due course produce, among other things, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and recipes utilizing the avocado. The civil code he drafted in Santa Fe survived him; so did his quarrel with John C. Frémont over the command of California, which the Army eventually settled in his favor with a court-martial.

Acting U.S. Secretary of State under Andrew Jackson in March 1829, until Van Buren's confirmation. Before that he served as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was Alexander Hamilton's third son, and signed his name at the top of Philolexian's original 1802 parchment scroll: the formal founder of the Society.

John Lloyd Stephens (CC 1822) entered Columbia at thirteen, left first in his class, explored Central America, and founded the Panama Railroad. With the English draughtsman Frederick Catherwood he tramped Copán, Palenque, and Chichén Itzá, returning with the books that made Maya civilization legible to a North American readership and disposed, at long last, of the theory that the cities had been built by wandering Phoenicians.

Hamilton Fish (CC 1827) compiled the kind of resume that flatters the Society and exhausts a biographer: secretary of state, senator, governor. Under Grant he ran the State Department for eight years, an unusual feat given the surrounding cabinet's rotating disgraces, and brokered the 1871 Treaty of Washington, by which the United States and Great Britain agreed, with surprising equanimity, not to go to war over the Alabama.

Abram Hewitt's career is a strong argument against the modern habit of specialization: ironmaster, congressman, charter-author of Cooper Union, and the only mayor of New York to defeat both a future President (Roosevelt) and the most influential political economist of the age (Henry George) in the same election. He took his Columbia degree in 1842, taught mathematics there briefly, then went into business with Peter Cooper and never met a civic institution he did not eventually agree to run.

John Purroy Mitchel (CC 1899) ran New York for one term and is remembered chiefly for what came after: a fall from an Army training aircraft in 1918, after he had failed to fasten his seatbelt. As "Boy Mayor" he was the second-youngest in the city's history, an anti-Tammany reformer who professionalized the civil service, antagonized everyone, and was retired from office at thirty-eight. The bronze plaque between the western pylons of Hamilton Hall is a small remembrance still observed by Philos.

"Wild Bill" Langer (CC 1910) graduated Columbia and went home to North Dakota to spend a half-century being unmanageable. Twice elected governor and four times senator, he survived an expulsion proceeding (1942), voted against the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty, and held the floor for hours on grievances large and small. He stands as a useful corrective to the assumption that the lessons of Philolexian leave a man cosmopolitan.

Samuel Irving Rosenman (CC 1915, Columbia Law 1919) coined the phrase "New Deal" in a draft of Roosevelt's 1932 Democratic National Convention acceptance speech and remained FDR's principal speechwriter until Roosevelt's death; Truman then kept him on as Special Counsel to the President — the first person to hold what is now the office of White House Counsel — through 1946. A New York State Assemblyman (1922–1926) and Justice of the New York Supreme Court (1936–1943) before joining the White House staff full time, he edited the standard 13-volume Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1938–1950) and published the memoir Working with Roosevelt in 1952. As a Columbia undergraduate he was a Curtis Medal contestant and a member of Delta Sigma Rho, the national forensics honor society whose chapter overlapped substantially with Philo. President of the New York City Bar Association 1964–1966.

Samuel Blatchford (CC 1837) is the Philolexian who became, by way of two decades of compiled reports and a decade on the federal bench, the last appointee Chester A. Arthur ever made to the Supreme Court. He arrived at Columbia at thirteen, finished at seventeen, and proved equal in adulthood to the precocity, dispatching opinions in 430 Supreme Court cases between 1882 and his death in 1893.

Benjamin Nathan Cardozo (CC 1889, M.A. 1890, Columbia Law 1889–1891) entered Columbia at fifteen, took Phi Beta Kappa, and passed the New York bar without a law degree, which the state then permitted after two years of study. Two decades of appellate practice in Manhattan produced, in 1913, an election to the state Supreme Court, and within weeks a designation to the New York Court of Appeals, where he served for eighteen years and closed his tenure as Chief Judge. Herbert Hoover appointed him to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1932 to succeed Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.; he sat with Brandeis and Stone as one of the "Three Musketeers" of the liberal bloc upholding the New Deal until his death in 1938.

His opinions were unusually readable for judicial writing. A few of his better sentences still surface in Philolexian's weekly debates ("Justice is not to be taken by storm. She is to be wooed by slow advances.") and in the censor's reports afterward ("The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.").

Stephanos Bibas (CC '89) read summa cum laude at Columbia, took a first at Oxford in 1991, and earned his JD at Yale in 1994, clerking then for Patrick Higginbotham on the Fifth Circuit and, in 1997, for Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. He spent the next two decades at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he directed the Supreme Court Clinic and became one of the country's leading scholars of plea bargaining, sentencing, and criminal procedure; his The Machinery of Criminal Justice (Oxford, 2012) examines how American criminal justice came to dispense with juries in favor of bargains struck in hallways. In 2017 he was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where he has since been resolving in opinions the questions he previously raised in books.

Member of the very first cohort to sign the original parchment scroll. Returned to Columbia as professor of Greek and Latin and ultimately served as the College’s eighth president, 1842–1849. The first Philolexian to head the institution that housed it; not the last.

Charles Anthon (CC 1815) held Columbia's Jay Professorship of Greek from 1830 until his death in 1867 and produced, for a generation of American schoolboys learning Latin, the standard textbooks. A Copious and Critical English-Latin Lexicon (1856) made him the most-published American classicist of the nineteenth century; his school editions of Cicero, Horace, and Caesar went through printing after printing. He preferred his classical texts unabridged and his lexicons unforgiving, and as a result furnished most of what nineteenth-century America knew about the classics.

Alfred Thayer Mahan (CC 1858) wrote one book that rearranged the geopolitics of the late nineteenth century: The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783 (1890), which argued that great-power supremacy depended on a battle fleet and the bases to provision it. The Kaiser kept a copy on his desk; Theodore Roosevelt had absorbed it before he was thirty; the United States, which had little reason in 1890 to want a blue-water navy, proceeded to build one. He served twice as president of the Naval War College and produced enough sequels to keep the argument going through 1905.

Edwin R. A. Seligman (CC 1878) was the political economist whose textbook on public finance, originally published in 1895, made the case for progressive income taxation respectable in a country whose Supreme Court had just struck the federal version down. He served as the first McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia, founded the American Economic Association, and lobbied (successfully) for the constitutional amendment that resurrected the income tax in 1913. Whatever one makes of the durability of his side of the argument, the federal government has been dining out on his work ever since.

John Erskine (CC 1900, M.A. 1901, Ph.D. 1903) took the Society's literary arguments rather seriously. The 1920 General Honors Course he taught at Columbia, a two-year seminar reading the classics in translation, launched with a first cohort of two students and a second capped at ten, is the direct progenitor of Columbia's famed Literature Humanities course and, at one remove, of the whole American Great Books movement. Junior teachers Mark Van Doren and, from 1923, Mortimer Adler took up sections; Adler left for Chicago in 1929 and, with Robert Hutchins, went on to launch the Great Books of the Western World. Erskine's 1915 essay “The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent” gave the whole project its mission statement.

He wrote, by his own approximate count, over one hundred books: the 1925 novel The Private Life of Helen of Troy (filmed by Alexander Korda in 1927 and adapted by George Antheil into the opera Helen Retires, composed 1931 and premiered 1934, for which Erskine wrote the libretto) made him a household name among the kind of households that follows contemporary librettos. A trained pianist and composer, he was also the first President of the Juilliard School of Music (1928–1937).

Philolexian president as an undergraduate; later a Columbia professor who organized a 1943 wartime revival of the Society. Author of From Dawn to Decadence, The House of Intellect, and dozens more. Knighted in the French Legion of Honor at age 83; received the Presidential Medal of Freedom at age 96; and finally grabbed the brass ring of the Society's Distinguished Literary Achievement Award on April 16, 2011, at the age of 103.

Wm. Theodore de Bary (CC 1941) spent nearly seven decades at Columbia making the case, against the academic grain, that Confucian thought was a tradition of arguments rather than a museum exhibit. He edited the Sources of Chinese Tradition and its Japanese and Indian companions; established the field of Neo-Confucian studies in English; reorganized the Core Curriculum to include non-Western civilizations; and as Provost, kept the place running through the post-1968 austerity. He retired three times and the National Humanities Medal arrived anyway.

George Templeton Strong (CC 1838) began a diary as a Columbia sophomore in 1835, fueled by a cup or two of coffee, and kept it for the next four decades until it ran to roughly four million words. The Civil War volumes, in particular, are the document everyone with a serious interest in Lincoln-era New York eventually quotes; he also did the actual unromantic work of keeping the U.S. Sanitary Commission solvent. The diary is dry, Episcopal, snobbish, opinionated, indispensable, and immensely readable.

Henry Demarest Lloyd (CC 1867) wrote the muckraking exposé that Ida Tarbell would later make famous: The Atlantic's March 1881 attack on Standard Oil, twenty-one years before McClure's. He extended the argument into Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), his attack on the power of the great corporate trusts. He was also a sentimental reformer who tried to live in a Cotswold cottage on Lake Michigan; he is forgiven this on the strength of the prose.

A central figure in the Society's early-twentieth-century revival, Kilmer lends his name to a tradition begun after the Society's 1985 refounding: the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest, the Society's most public-facing event, held every November in his honor.

Bourne wrote for The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Seven Arts, and became one of the most prominent young critics of the Progressive era. Died of the influenza pandemic in 1918, at the age of 32.

Cornell Woolrich (CC 1925, though he left without graduating when his first novel Cover Charge was published as an undergraduate) is one of the great American crime writers of his generation, included in the pantheon with Hammett and Chandler. His stories and novels supplied Hollywood with two dozen thrillers, most famously Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), based on his 1942 short story "It Had to Be Murder," and François Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black (1968), based on his 1940 novel.

Among the most commercially successful Philolexian novelists of the twentieth century. The Caine Mutiny won the Pulitzer for Fiction in 1952. The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978) bookended a long career that ran almost to his hundredth birthday.

Brought a confessional, syncopated, often hilarious lyric voice to American poetry. 77 Dream Songs won the Pulitzer for Poetry in 1965; His Toy, His Dream, His Rest followed in 1968. Died in 1972.

Infamous Moderator of the Society: the friendships he formed at Columbia, with his fellow Philolexian Lucien Carr and, through Carr, with Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, became the Beat Generation. He won Columbia's Woodberry Poetry Prize, contributed to the Columbia Review and the Jester, and was suspended for a year after composing an editorial appraisal of President Nicholas Murray Butler in the dust of a Hartley Hall window. Howl followed in 1956. His inclusion in the notable section, and not the infamous section, is a testament to the power of his writing, learned as a Philolexian.

John Hollander (CC 1950) belonged to the most intimidating Columbia cohort of the postwar period (Ginsberg, Howard, Epstein, Gottlieb) and, under the mentorship of Trilling and Van Doren, emerged from it as that cohort's most disciplined craftsman. Rhyme's Reason, his short verse-form primer, is the rare prosody manual that working poets actually keep on their shelf; Types of Shape turned the page itself into the poem. Yale eventually retained him as Sterling Professor; the MacArthur Foundation followed with a fellowship.

Richard Howard (CC 1951) wrote one Pulitzer-winning book of dramatic monologues spoken by minor Victorians (Untitled Subjects, 1969), and 150-odd translations from the French: Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, the bulk of Roland Barthes, and a great deal of Camus and Stendhal. The late twentieth century's American reader of French literature has often, without quite noticing, been reading Richard Howard.

Stein was at Columbia in the years immediately following the 1985 refounding, taking his B.A. from Columbia College in 1987 and an M.F.A. in film from the School of the Arts in 1990. He sat early enough in the Society's modern era to be, by definition, formative: one of the Philos whose presence proved the refounding had taken.

He co-produced The Lunch Date, which won the Academy Award for Best Live-Action Short. The Art of Racing in the Rain (Harper, 2008) is told from the perspective of a dog with strong views on Formula One. It became a No. 1 BookSense pick, sold more than six million copies in thirty-eight languages, and was adapted as a film in 2019. Stein lives in Seattle. For all the stories he has told, at Philolexian gatherings the students only want to hear about the body found in a rolled-up carpet in Carmen Hall.

Kay Gabriel (CC 2013) is the current-generation Philolexian poet: three books deep before she turned thirty-five, and, since 2022, editorial director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, the chair Anne Waldman held for a decade and the room in which Ginsberg (CC '48) gave many of his New York readings. Kissing Other People or the House of Fame (Rosa, 2023), A Queen in Bucks County (Nightboat, 2022), and Perverts (Nightboat, 2025) collect her verse-essays and diaristic poems; she co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat, 2020). She is the youngest featured Philolexian on this page. For the moment.

Herbert Sebastian Agar (CC 1919) won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1934 for The People's Choice, his revisionist survey of American presidents from Washington to Harding, and spent the next half-decade as editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he became one of the small handful of American editors whose front page mattered to the White House. In 1941 he moved to London as an aide to Ambassador John Winant and ran the U.S. Embassy's cultural-relations program through the war; he stayed in England for the rest of his life. Twelve more books followed the Pulitzer, on subjects ranging from Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln, 1952) to the collapse of European liberalism (The Price of Union, 1950, and its sequel The Price of Power, 1957) to Sacco and Vanzetti (The Unquiet Grave, 1964). He wrote until his death in Sussex in 1980.

Columbia '85; revived the Philolexian Society on October 16, 1985, known thereafter as the Society's "Avatar." Founding editor of The Week; later deputy editor of The Week. Wrote on popular culture for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and GQ. Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker (2015) remains the standard on the subject.

Jay Michaelson (CC 1993) writes faster than most readers read: ten books on Buddhism, Kabbalah, queer Judaism, and the politics of the religious right; National Jewish Book Award; CNN legal analyst; columnist at Rolling Stone. The Heresy of Jacob Frank (2022) is the long-awaited revisionist biography of the eighteenth-century Polish messiah; Everything Is God (2009) is the unexpected work of synthesis that makes the case for nondual Judaism.

Ian Bateson (CC 2006) is the Foundation's Ukraine correspondent. He arrived in Kyiv around 2012 and stayed through the Maidan revolution, the annexation of Crimea, and the first years of the Donbas war, filing for the Kyiv Post, Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, openDemocracy, The Economist's 1843, and Rest of World, among others. In July 2014 he crossed into separatist-held Donetsk on rebel accreditation to report from the MH17 crash site; in 2016 he was one of the foreign journalists doxxed on Ukraine's Mirotvorets list, which he then covered as its own story in a widely-cited Foreign Policy piece on the killing of Pavel Sheremet. He held fellowships at the Wilson Center's Kennan Institute and, on a Fulbright, at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna. Since Russia's full-scale invasion he has served in U.S. government roles: Russian-language spokesperson and deputy director of the U.S. State Department's Brussels Regional Media Hub. That he works in five languages is, at Philolexian, the sort of thing that gets a nod rather than a paragraph.

Alfred Harcourt (CC 1904) and his classmate Donald Brace put in fifteen orderly years at Henry Holt before walking out in 1919 to start Harcourt, Brace & Howe, a decision improved, almost immediately, by Sinclair Lewis. Lewis brought Main Street and Babbitt, and the new firm acquired in short order Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and most of the Hogarth Press's American rights to Virginia Woolf. If there was a way to keep score in these matters, that list could be the best decade any American publishing house has ever had.

James George Leippert (CC 1933) was President of the Philolexian Society, Secretary before that, and a winner of the Society's own Literary Competition. While still a Columbia undergraduate he was already running literary magazines and, in a way that seems improbable to a modern undergraduate, printing original Gertrude Stein, Conrad Aiken, e. e. cummings, Jacques Barzun, and Erskine Caldwell pieces alongside classmates and unknowns. On graduating he closed one editorial life and opened another under a series of aliases (Martin Jay, Mark Jason, Mark Zorn, J. Ronald Latimer, and finally Ronald Lane Latimer), through which he ran the most consequential small poetry press of the American 1930s.

As Latimer he founded Alcestis: A Poetry Quarterly in 1934 and the Alcestis Press shortly after. In four years he re-started two of the great careers of American modernism: Wallace Stevens, who had published no new book of poetry in twelve years, gave Alcestis the first appearance of "The Idea of Order at Key West" in the debut issue and then two books (Ideas of Order, 1935; Owl's Clover, 1936); William Carlos Williams, in the same drought, gave him An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935) and Adam & Eve and the City (1936). Stevens's daughter Holly, editing her father's letters, recorded that from 1934 to 1938 "his major correspondent was Latimer." The Alcestis Press books that followed launched Allen Tate (The Mediterranean and Other Poems, 1936), Robert Penn Warren (Thirty-Six Poems, 1935), and John Peale Bishop (Minute Particulars, 1935); the quarterly ran R. P. Blackmur, Herbert Read, Robert Fitzgerald, and Willard Maas, and Latimer corresponded copiously with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Malcolm Cowley, Ford Madox Ford, and Mark Van Doren.

In 1938 he closed the press and disappeared into Japan as a Buddhist monk, returned to the U.S. months before Pearl Harbor, took orders as an Episcopal priest, and died alone in a Sarasota church in 1964, at 55, possibly by his own hand. Between his editorship of the Society and his editorship of Wallace Stevens, Philolexian has now been on the inside of most of what happened to twentieth-century American poetry. If anyone is so inclined to make a movie about the Philolexians, they might consider starting with the life of James George Leippert.

Robert Giroux (CC 1936) is the proof, if any were needed, that a great editor's name eventually moves to the marquee. He took the Columbia Review and the Philolexian presidency in 1936; was Berryman, Wouk, and Merton's college contemporary; signed Merton at Harcourt and left in 1955 to join Farrar, Straus, where he later edited Berryman as well. Nine years later the firm became Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Among his subsequent acquisitions: Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Bishop. He edited seven Nobel laureates.

Ralph de Toledano (CC 1938) is one of those Philolexians who started on the left, went to Newsweek, covered the Alger Hiss trial in 1950, and never returned. He was among the founders of William F. Buckley's National Review in 1955, and for the next half-century contributed to its pages as editor, political columnist, and (in the 1980s) music critic. He produced twenty-six books (Seeds of Treason among them) and, through his King Features Syndicate column, became for a generation of postwar American conservatives the writer one consulted on espionage cases. Whether one finds him persuasive depends largely on what one thought of fellow Philo Whittaker Chambers.

Jason Epstein (CC 1949) had three good ideas, executed all of them, and lived long enough to see each become a literary institution. At Doubleday in 1953 he invented the trade paperback as Anchor Books. In 1963, with his wife Barbara and Robert Silvers, he turned a New York newspaper strike into The New York Review of Books. In 1979 he resurrected Edmund Wilson's stalled proposal for a Pléiade-style American canon, raised the money, and called it the Library of America. One could do worse for a working life.

Ashbel Green (CC 1950) joined Alfred A. Knopf in 1964 and stayed for forty-three years, rising to senior editor and vice president of Random House. He specialized in history, biography, current affairs, and international literature. His signature acquisition was Gabriel García Márquez, whom he brought over from Harper & Row; he edited Márquez's later American editions from The Autumn of the Patriarch forward. He edited Václav Havel, Milovan Djilas, Andrei Sakharov, and Jacobo Timerman as they emerged from Eastern Europe and Argentina, respectively. He edited Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers, which won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History, and George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft's A World Transformed. Closer to home, he edited My Columbia: Reminiscences of University Life for the University's 250th anniversary.

Robert Gottlieb (CC 1952) was the editor whose authors were so famous that one identifies him backwards from them: Heller, Morrison, le Carré, Caro, Rushdie, Lessing. He ran Simon & Schuster, then Knopf; in 1987 succeeded William Shawn at The New Yorker, the most thankless transition in twentieth-century publishing, and survived it. His only fault as a Knopf editor was a tendency to believe in the public's appetite for books about ballet. The firms continued to thrive on the rest of his judgment.

Perry Metzger has spent three decades running mailing lists for people who write cryptographic protocols and argue about money, which is to say he has spent three decades on the internet. As proprietor of the Cryptography list at metzdowd.com, he was the host of Satoshi Nakamoto's October 2008 announcement of Bitcoin and the subsequent back-and-forth improving the idea, and, six weeks later, the moderator who told everyone to stop talking about it and go write papers. He has since co-authored IPsec RFCs, coined the term "Jupiter Brain," and co-founded a Washington nonprofit dedicated to the proposition that artificial intelligence will not, in fact, kill us all.

One of two writers credited on Citizen Kane (1941). Won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay alongside Orson Welles. Wrote the book and lyrics for the 1916 Varsity Show The Peace Pirates; "Off-Hour" editor of the Spectator; first drama editor of The New Yorker in 1925.

The annual Society theatre productions of the 1910s and '20s put Buchman on stage in Shakespeare's Richard II. He went on to write Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, 1941), The Talk of the Town, and a long list of other Hollywood scripts. Subpoenaed by HUAC and effectively blacklisted in the 1950s.

Bellah's short stories, published mostly in The Saturday Evening Post, formed the basis for John Ford's cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande. He also co-wrote the screenplay for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

Robert C. Schnitzer (CC 1927) ran enough American theatre, in enough institutional capacities, that one is surprised to discover he was also briefly an actor. The WPA's Federal Theatre Project occupied him during the late thirties; ANTA's international exchange program in the fifties; the Theatre Guild's State Department-backed American Repertory Company in the early sixties. He outlived most of his colleagues and at the time of his death in 2008 (at 101) was the oldest surviving Philolexian of his era.

William Ludwig (CC 1932) wrote for MGM for twenty unbroken years, an industry record nobody is in any hurry to break, and won his Academy Award for Interrupted Melody, the 1955 biopic of the polio-stricken Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. He also adapted Oklahoma! the same year. Among his more durable contributions to the country: a co-founding role in the Writers Guild of America, and the creation of the Andy Hardy franchise: fifteen films and most of MGM's small-town America from 1937 to 1958.

John La Touche (CC 1937) wrote what is, on a per-line basis, a respectable share of mid-century American song. Cabin in the Sky gave him "Taking a Chance on Love"; the Ballad for Americans gave wartime radio its anthem; The Golden Apple won the Drama Critics' Circle in 1954; and The Ballad of Baby Doe gave the modest American operatic repertory one of its only fixtures. He died at forty-one of a heart attack.

Isadore Diamond (CC 1941) was a Columbia mathematics major who won the Interscholastic Algebra League title four times (hence "I. A. L.") and then spent thirty years writing comedies with Billy Wilder. The Apartment alone is enough; Some Like It Hot is more than enough. He won one Oscar, was nominated for several more, and is the kind of Philolexian whose name is in the credits of films an American can quote without having seen.

Ben Stein (CC 1966) is the rare Philolexian who is recognizable by his deadpan, since the deadpan starred in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, hosted Win Ben Stein's Money for five years (seven Daytime Emmys), and previously wrote speeches for Richard Nixon. The Columbia degree is in economics; the Yale degree in law; the cultural footprint is in monotone. Anyone? Anyone?

Gideon Yago (CC 2000) joined MTV News on graduation and spent the next seven years bringing reportage to a cable network whose audience had not, on the whole, signed up for it. He covered the 2000 and 2004 elections, reported from Iraq during the early years of the war, and conducted political interviews (often the first the interviewees had ever given to a music channel) between music videos. His MTV work brought back a Peabody Award (2003, for the network's sexual-health campaign) and a News Emmy (2004, for Choose or Lose election programming). He has since written for Rolling Stone, GQ, and television, including co-writing an episode of Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom and story credits on Narcos, Quantico, and The Mosquito Coast. The strategy of putting consequential reporting on a youth network was, at the time, considered a fool's errand; the audience that watched him grew up to dominate the political conversation that followed.

Jane Friedhoff (CC 2010) works in the smallest of the screens that have absorbed the Society's playwrights and screenwriters: the phone. An indie game designer and creative technologist, she spent 2013–2016 at The New York Times R&D Lab, then joined The Office for Creative Research, then Google's Creative Lab through 2019. Her 2019 Morse Code project for Google won two Webbys — Best User Experience, and Apps, Mobile & Voice: Technical Achievement (with the People's Voice Award) — the first Philolexian Webbys on record.

Stuyvesant Fish (CC 1871) joined the Illinois Central as a clerk on graduation, became its president sixteen years later, and ran it through the period during which it grew from a regional carrier into one of the largest American railroads. E. H. Harriman pried him out in 1906; the Newport mansions and Mamie Fish's parties, which seated a monkey in evening dress as a visiting prince and once brought in an elephant, did more than most to define the Gilded Age for everyone who was not invited. He was Hamilton Fish's third son; one had to do something.

William Barclay Parsons (CC 1879) is the engineer beneath New York: chief engineer of the Rapid Transit Commission in 1894, designer of the IRT subway as it opened in 1904, designer of the Cape Cod Canal, founder of the firm now called Parsons Brinckerhoff. As a Columbia undergraduate he was president of his class, president of Philolexian, and co-founder of the Columbia Daily Spectator. The College took the hint and named the engineering school's professorship of civil engineering after him.

William Fellowes Morgan Sr. (CC 1880, School of Mines 1884) was Theodore Roosevelt's friend, poll-watcher, and Bull Moose ally, president of the New York YMCA for fourteen years, Columbia trustee (1910–1916), and a pioneer of refrigerated warehousing in the United States. But the reason he belongs on this page is the name of his company: the Brooklyn Bridge Freezing and Cold Storage Company, quartered, literally, inside Arch No. 11 of the bridge, and awaiting only the rock band, garage-punk revival, or Brooklyn-microbrewery collaboration that will finally do it justice. The Foundation is prepared to negotiate a Philolexian discount on trademark inquiries.

Ward Melville (CC 1909) made his money in shoes (Thom McAn opened in 1922 and grew to 1,400 stores), and proceeded to spend it on Long Island. The 400 acres he donated to New York State in 1957 became Stony Brook University; the Stony Brook village historic district was substantially his project, in the period style. The Melville Corporation eventually acquired CVS in 1969, which is how a Philolexian man ended up on the back of a drugstore receipt — hence the phrase: He held the lectern longer than a CVS receipt.

Lawrence Wien (CC 1925) invented, more or less single-handedly, the American real-estate syndicate: the legal structure by which a group of small investors could collectively own large income-producing properties. In 1961 he bought the Empire State Building with Harry Helmsley for $65 million, which is roughly the price of an apartment in it now. The Wien Stadium at Columbia commemorates his subsequent generosity to the Lions; the Lions in turn produced a football team for which he must in his lifetime have made a great many quiet apologies.

Jack Hidary (CC 1991) ran a few companies, took one of them public, and by the late 2010s had landed at Alphabet's X Moonshot Factory. In 2022 he was tapped as CEO to spin out SandboxAQ, and commercialise post-quantum cryptography and quantum sensors for defence, life sciences, and finance. His Quantum Computing: An Applied Approach (Springer, 2019; second edition 2021) is the seminal textbook for this frontier topic; his AI or Die: A Guide for Leaders is forthcoming in 2026.

Oliver Wolcott Gibbs (CC 1841) is the kind of nineteenth-century American scientist who produces, on inspection, an embarrassingly long curriculum vitae: a Columbia degree at nineteen, training in Berlin and Paris under most of the chemists worth training under, the first electrogravimetric analyses of copper and nickel, founding membership in the National Academy of Sciences (1863) and its presidency thirty years later. He spent his last working decades in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, which was lucky to have him.

Ziegler (CC 1911) went from Columbia to a lay missionary posting in Alaska and, ordained in 1913, spent the next quarter century in the Episcopal Church's frontier missions before being consecrated fourth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Wyoming in 1936.

The story a Philolexian ought to know, however, is this: traveling in Wyoming in 1937, Ziegler was forced by a blizzard to take shelter in the unincorporated hamlet of Bondurant. He kept the place in mind. When Mrs. John Markoe bequeathed a diamond to the Episcopal Church with instructions that it fund a memorial church in the most remote part of the United States, Ziegler suggested Bondurant. The diamond sold for $1,400. He returned to organize construction with local volunteers, and the rustic log Church of St. Hubert the Hunter and Library was built in 1940–41 and dedicated in 1943, later earning a place on the National Register of Historic Places.

A Philolexian driving to California would find Bondurant a worthwhile detour, perhaps after camping in Yellowstone — assuming, of course, that the first stop of the trip was the Joyce Kilmer rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Robert E. Marshak (CC 1936) entered Columbia at sixteen, took his Cornell PhD at twenty-three, and spent the war years on the Manhattan Project's Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. He went on to chair the physics department at Rochester for two decades (where the annual "Rochester Conferences" became the defining gathering of the world's particle physicists) and served as the eighth president of CCNY through the open-admissions era. He drowned while swimming off Cancún in 1992; what survives is the V-A theory of weak interactions, which he and George Sudarshan formulated a step before Feynman and Gell-Mann arrived at the same result.

Thomas Merton (CC 1938) entered Columbia a young aesthete and left a Catholic; entered the Abbey of Gethsemani three years later and stayed for the next twenty-seven, producing (under monastic vows of silence) fifty books, a number of which became unaccountably best-selling. The Seven Storey Mountain sold six hundred thousand copies in its first year. He died accidentally in 1968, electrocuted by a faulty fan in Bangkok; the resulting posthumous Philolexian career has been long and well-tended.

Robert N. Butler (CC 1949) coined "ageism" in 1969 to name the same prejudice he had been documenting clinically for years; Why Survive? Being Old in America (1975) won the Pulitzer Prize and made elder care a respectable subfield of public health. As founding director of the National Institute on Aging (1976) he turned the federal government's attention, however briefly, to gerontology; the geriatric medicine department he established at Mount Sinai in 1982 was the first in the country.

Rheumatologist and infectious-disease researcher whose 1975–77 investigation of an unexplained arthritis cluster in Old Lyme, Connecticut, led to the identification and naming of Lyme disease, and, with Willy Burgdorfer, to the isolation of its spirochetal cause Borrelia burgdorferi in 1982. Steere spent his early career at Yale under Stephen Malawista before moving to Tufts and, in 2002, to Massachusetts General Hospital, where he is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and directs translational research on Lyme arthritis at the Center for Immunology and Inflammatory Diseases. His nearly three hundred papers established the clinical staging, diagnostic serology, antibiotic protocols, and autoimmune mechanisms of the disease he named; he remains the field's principal author on the IDSA, AAN, and ACR treatment guidelines.

Sevastiades had at least four careers first (Wall Street, fashion photography, the publishing trade, and finally the Greek Orthodox priesthood), a trajectory that ought not have been possible in one life and was. As Father Economou he ran the only Orthodox Christian radio program in northern Minnesota. As a Philolexian he was famous, in the debate hall, for arguing with unsettling consistency that monarchy was the form of government best suited to our present age. He wrote eight children's books on the religions of the world for grade-school readers (among them I Am Eastern Orthodox, I Am Roman Catholic, and I Am Protestant), and co-translated Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation (Oracle, 2002) for the Millennium Translation Project. He died at forty-eight, in Duluth, in 2004.

Brander Matthews (CC 1871) persuaded the American university that the theater could be a subject for adults. As Columbia's first full-time professor of dramatic literature he turned forty books (on Molière, on Shakespeare-as-stagecraft, on the techniques of playwriting) into a small establishment, and along the way co-founded the Authors and Players clubs because writers and actors needed somewhere to drink that was not a hotel lobby. He also reviewed plays for the Times for thirty years, which, while simultaneously teaching about and drinking with the Broadway actors and writers of his day, was a separate and somewhat heroic achievement.

Gustav Kobbé (CC 1877, LL.B. 1879, M.A. 1880) collected three Columbia degrees and then spent his entire working life in newspapers, which is one way of reading the value of a legal education. He was music critic of the Herald under James Gordon Bennett for eighteen years; before that the World had sent him to Bayreuth in 1882 to cover the first performance of Parsifal, an assignment that would now be given to a bureau chief and was then given to a man of twenty-five. He wrote for the Century, Scribner's, the North American Review and the Ladies' Home Journal, edited The Lotus Magazine, and produced some twenty-five books.

One of them refused to die. The Complete Opera Book appeared posthumously in 1919, was taken over and enlarged by the Earl of Harewood, and is still on sale as Kobbé's Complete Opera Book: a hundred and seven years of continuous print, which is more than can be said for most of the operas in it. He did not live to see the first edition: on 27 July 1918 he was sailing on Great South Bay when a seaplane coming down to land struck his boat and killed him instantly.

Philolexians tend to inspire each other. Witness the beat generation, the great books movement, the golden-age Hollywood writers’ room, and the postwar New York publishing renaissance. It happened with the jazz scene as well.

On 1 June 1938 the Spectator reported that the Philolexian Prize for prose had gone to Eugene Williams (CC 1938) for an essay called "The Elements of Jazz." The poetry prize went the same evening to Ralph de Toledano, the Society's former president. The judges were Theodric Westbrook and Dr. Jacques Barzun, instructor in history, himself a Philolexian, who would go on to write Berlioz and the Romantic Century. It is not obvious that any other undergraduate prize awarded in America that year had a jazz essay in it, still less one judged by a future historian of French Romantic music.

Fifteen months later Williams and de Toledano (later co-founder of National Review and its jazz columnist), along with fellow Class of 1938 alumnus Ralph J. Gleason (later co-founder of Rolling Stone and co-founder of the Monterey Jazz Festival), founded Jazz Information, mimeographed in the back room of Milt Gabler's Commodore Music Shop on East 42nd Street. It was the first American magazine purely about jazz. In 1942 Williams went down to New Orleans and recorded Bunk Johnson, the trumpeter who had been out of music for a decade and had no teeth; the records set off the New Orleans revival and the long argument that came with it. Williams was dead at twenty-nine, which is why he is the least famous man in this section and arguably the most consequential.

Barry Ulanov (CC 1939) took the other side. Where Williams and de Toledano looked back to New Orleans, Ulanov used Metronome to argue for Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie while the argument was still open and rather bad-tempered. The quarrel had a name, the moldy figs against the modernists, and it ran through American jazz criticism for a decade, occasionally onto the radio, where Ulanov once assembled a band to play against Rudi Blesh's traditionalists in what both sides agreed to call a battle.

He wrote Duke Ellington (1946) while Ellington was in mid-career, and A History of Jazz in America (1952), which was for years the standard single volume. Then he left the magazines for Barnard, taught English for thirty years, and turned to painting: The Two Worlds of American Art (1965) is about pictures, not music, and qualified him as a critic in two arts.

Martin Emanuel Levin (CC 1940, MA 1941) was, perhaps, the most prolific book reviewer in the modern history of American criticism. He wrote for The New York Times Book Review from 1958 to 1985. His weekly column, called Reader's Report from 1961 and New & Novel from 1977, was where the editors sent the manuscripts they had judged worthy of notice but not worthy of a standalone review: a thicket of forgettable first novels, a welter of westerns, a great many multigenerational family sagas. Levin reviewed them, six or eight at a time, week after week, for twenty-seven years. By any conservative accounting he read and reported on more than three thousand books in that tenure. Authors and publishers whose books turned up in the column spoke of having been Levinized, a verb they had invented for the occasion.

After The Times had just returned from a 114-day newspaper strike, Levin reviewed thirty-eight books at once. It remains, so far as anyone can find, the single largest bundle of reviews ever published under one byline in an American newspaper.

The volume did not mean a lack of discernment. In 1962 he rhapsodized over Bruce Jay Friedman's Stern and praised Ken Kesey's debut, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, at a length that startled Kesey's own editors. The book he told his son he loved best was Claude Simon's The Wind (1959); Simon won the Nobel Prize twenty-six years after Levin's review.

Orrin Keepnews (CC 1943) published one of the first serious profiles of Thelonious Monk in The Record Changer in 1948, at a moment when the consensus held Monk to be a novelty act with an unreliable left hand. Five years later he co-founded Riverside Records and began recording him, and then Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Wes Montgomery and most of the rest of the label's catalogue. The critic had become the man who made the thing being criticised, an arrangement that would now attract a disclosure statement.

He never stopped writing. The liner note was his form and he worked in it for six decades, three times winning a Grammy for album notes, a category you did not know existed until you read this sentence, and which he effectively defined. The View from Within (1988) collects forty years of it.

Lucien Carr was in prison before he finished his Core Curriculum requirements. In 1944, he stabbed David Kammerer to death in Riverside Park, served only two years at Elmira after a gay-panic defense midcentury courts accepted without scrutiny, then joined the United Press in 1946 and never left. The pre-killing year is what makes his Philo experience lasting: it was Carr who, in 1943, brought together his fellow Philo Allen Ginsberg, the Columbia football dropout Jack Kerouac, and Carr's St. Louis childhood mentor William S. Burroughs into the same Morningside Heights apartment. The "New Vision" they argued for that year (heavy on the Yeats, light on the academic formalism) became the Beat Generation. Kerouac and Ginsberg wrote it down; Carr made that combustible social geometry possible.