Robert Darnton  

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Robert Darnton (born May 10, 1939) is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France. Darnton is a pioneer in the growing field of the history of the book. One of his books is The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996).

Life

Darnton was born in New York City. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1957 and Harvard University in 1960, attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and earned a PhD (DPhil) in history from Oxford in 1964, where he studied with Richard Cobb, among others. The title of his thesis was Trends in radical propaganda on the eve of the French Revolution (1782–1788). He worked as reporter at The New York Times from 1964 to 1965. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows from 1965 to 1968. Joining the Princeton University faculty in 1968, he was appointed Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1982. He was president of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies from 1987 to 1991, where he founded the East-West Seminar, now continued as the International Seminar for Early Career Scholars.

Darnton was a trustee of the Oxford University Press from 1994 to 2007. He is a trustee of the New York Public Library, where he designed and helped launch the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

On July 1, 2007, he transferred to emeritus status at Princeton, and was appointed Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, succeeding Sidney Verba. As University Librarian, he co-founded the Digital Public Library of America and he designed the digital archive Colonial North America: Worlds of Change. In January 2016, Ann Blair succeeded him as the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor.

Darnton is a pioneer in the field of the history of the book, and has written about electronic publishing.

Family

His brother is the retired New York Times editor and author John Darnton, and his father was the war correspondent Byron Darnton.

Works

• Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (1968)
• The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775-1800 (1979)
• The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) ISBN 0674536576
• The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984)
• Revolution in Print: the Press in France 1775-1800 (1989) edited with Daniel Roche
• The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (1989)
• Edition et sédition. L'univers de la littérature clandestine au XVIIIe siècle (1991)
• Berlin Journal, 1989-1990 (1991)
• Gens de lettres, gens du livre (1992)
• The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995)
• The Corpus of Clandestine Literature in France, 1769-1789 (1995)
• George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (June 2004)
• The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: NY Public Affairs. 2009. ISBN 978-1-58648-826-0.
• The Devil in the Holy Water, or the Art of Slander from Louis XIV to Napoleon. Philadelphia, PA: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-8122-4183-9.
• Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0-674-05715-9.
• Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. 2014. ISBN 978-0-393-24229-4.
• A Literary Tour de France: The World of Books on the Eve of the French Revolution. Oxford University Press. 2018. ISBN 978-0-19-514451-2. (author website)

See also

• Neue Kulturgeschichte
• Republic of Letters
• Robert Darnton and the historiography of the Enlightenment
• Libelle (literary genre)
• The public sphere of the Enlightenment
• History of the book

Linking in as of 2023

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