Clifton Fadiman is a man of letters whose effectiveness as a broadcast personality helped him spread the gospel of the rewards of book reading to a wide public. A book reviewer for The New Yorker and other distinguished periodicals, Fadiman found fame in the late 1930s and most of the 1940s as the host of the radio quiz program, Information, Please! Taking advantage of his radio popularity, Fadiman appeared in magazines as an essayist and critic, and between hard covers as an anthology editor and introduction writer. Through his introductions and prefaces to the world's great books, he became one of the first and most distinguished of that unique breed of twentieth-century scribes: the "popularizer." The advent of television kept Fadiman in the public eye, and he continued to be an unpretentious but fervent advocate for the joys of reading and the pleasures of...