Background

Randolph Silliman Bourne was born on the 30th of May 1886. He was the son Charles Rogers and Sarah (Barrett) Bourne. Due to an accident with obstetrical forceps at his birth, his face was permanently malformed. Then, at the age of four, he contracted spinal tuberculosis, an ailment which left him hunchbacked and dwarfed. When Bourne was ten, his father, who was in financial trouble because of business setbacks, asked his brother-in-law to help care for his family. Bourne’s maternal uncle agreed, on the condition that Bourne’s father leave the family and never return. Several authorities on Bourne believe that this occurrence had much to do with the essayist’s passionate dislike of Victorian capitalism and its Calvinistic equation of financial failure with immorality.

Education

In 1909, Bourne was granted a scholarship to Columbia University. There he was at last in his element, studying social science and philosophy under giants in these fields such as John Dewey, Franz Boaz, and Charles Beard, and becoming enamored of the Pragmatist philosophy as expounded by psychologist William James. One of Bourne’s essays, quoted by Casey Blake in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, asserts that “college furnishes an ideal environment, where the things at which a man handicapped like myself can succeed really count. He graduated from Columbia University in 1914.

Career

Randolph served on the staff of the New Republic and worked as a contributing editor of Dial and Seven Arts.

Achievements

• Randolph received a Gildern fellowship from Columbia University, in 1913-1914.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Youth and Life - Scholar's Choice Edition

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

    1913
  • The Gary Schools - Scholar's Choice Edition

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

    1916
  • Untimely Papers (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Untimely Papers This book is but the first o...)

    1919

Views

Bourne argued that the US should accommodate immigrant cultures into a "cosmopolitan America," instead of forcing immigrants to assimilate to Anglophilic culture.

Connections

colleague:

John Dewey

colleague:

Franz Boaz

References

• The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz, and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America
  1986