Charles Van Doren - Aftermath

Aftermath

Van Doren was dropped from NBC and resigned from his post of assistant professor at Columbia University. Van Doren became an editor at Praeger Books and a pseudonymous (at first) writer, before becoming an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and the author of several books, of which the popular-market text A History of Knowledge may be his best known. He also co-authored a well-received revision of How to Read a Book with its original author, philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, and co-edited with him a 1,771-page anthology entitled Great Treasury of Western Thought (1977).

In his eventual New Yorker article, Van Doren revealed he had actually been contemplating the Britannica job even at the height of his celebrity: taking a long walk with his father around the farmlands they both loved, the elder Van Doren mentioned to his son that Mortimer J. Adler, the philosopher and a member of Britannica's board of editors, had spoken of making Van Doren Britannica's editor-in-chief. Van Doren eventually accepted the job, he would write, by way of intercession from a former college roommate. Van Doren retired from Britannica in 1982.

Van Doren also revealed he had been offered an opportunity to do a PBS series on the history of philosophy but that its tentative producer, Julian Krainin, might actually have had in mind Van Doren's explicit cooperation on a planned PBS program recalling the quiz show scandals. When that did not occur (though the program thanked Van Doren explicitly, among other credits), Van Doren wrote, Krainin later sought his cooperation and consultation when Robert Redford was beginning to make Quiz Show—even conveying that Van Doren would be paid in six figures for it. After wrestling with the idea—and, he wrote, noting his wife's objections—Van Doren rejected it. It would be five decades before Van Doren finally broke his silence on the quiz show scandal to The New Yorker magazine.

Today, both Van Doren and his wife, Gerry, are adjunct professors of English at the University of Connecticut, Torrington branch. They live in a "small, old house" (his words) on the land his parents bought near Falls Village, Connecticut over eighty years earlier.