Jacques Barzun, a Columbia University historian and administrator whose sheer breadth of scholarship - culminating in a survey of 500 years of Western civilization - brought him renown as one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th century, died Oct. 25 in San Antonio, where he had lived in recent years. He was 104.
His son-in-law Gavin Parfit confirmed his death, the Associated Press reported.
Barzun was 92 when he published what is widely regarded as his masterwork, From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life: 1500 to the Present. Journalist David Gates spoke for a majority of critics when he wrote in Newsweek magazine that the book, which appeared in 2000, "will go down in history as one of the great one-man shows of Western letters."
