The American : The Hidden History of Daniel J. Boorstin and His Twentieth Century

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.

What does it mean to be an American? Historian Daniel J. Boorstin, one of the most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century, spent a lifetime pondering that question. In his revelatory book The American, Boorstin's son Jon, a novelist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker, probes this question to tell the biographical story his father never told: a chronicle of family, racial conflict, and immigrant Jewish life in twentieth-century America. Why did Boorstin—the 1974 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Americans: The Democratic Experience—write so little about himself? To answer that question, Jon Boorstin reaches back to the beginning of the 20th century and introduces readers to his immigrant grandfather, would-be southern gentleman Sam Boorstin, the youngest lawyer in Georgia's history. When Sam’s good friend Leo Frank was lynched in a notorious antisemitic incident, Sam moved his family to boomtown Tulsa, where Daniel was raised in the shadow of the infamous Tulsa Massacre of 1921. With sympathy tempered by a contemporary sensibility, Jon Boorstin shows how Sam’s response to these events shaped Daniel’s trademark optimism. Jon also explores his father's enduring friendship with the distinguished Black historian John Hope Franklin, a fellow Tulsan, both 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.