Randolph Silliman Bourne

Randolph Silliman Bourne (born May 30, 1886, Bloomfield, N.J., U.S.—died Dec. 22, 1918, New York, N.Y.) was an American literary critic and essayist whose polemical articles made him a spokesman for the young radicals who came of age on the eve of World War I.

Bourne was disfigured at birth by the attending physician’s forceps, and an attack of spinal tuberculosis at age four left him stunted and hunchbacked. He held a variety of odd jobs before winning a scholarship (at age 23) to Columbia University, from which he received an M.A. in 1913. That same year his Youth and Life appeared—essays affirming his belief that the youth of his day would sweep away much that was antiquated and unworthy in American life.

After a year in Europe, resulting in 1914 in “Impressions of Europe: 1913–14,” he turned his attention to the progressive education theories of the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, who had been his teacher at Columbia. The outcome was two books: The Gary Schools (1916) and Education and Living (1917).

Bourne had been a steady contributor to the liberal weekly The New Republic since its inception in 1914, but after the American government entered the war the magazine found his pacifist views unpalatable. He signaled his attack on the liberal support for the war in “The War and the Intellectuals” in the June 1917 issue of Seven Arts, a magazine whose antiwar articles—often by Bourne—led to its suppression in September of that year.

Bourne’s early death was brought on by influenza during the influenza epidemic of 1918–19. At his death he left incomplete a lengthy analysis of the modern state, built around his theory that war was the health of the state. Two posthumous volumes of essays appeared: Untimely Papers (1919), made up largely of his antiwar articles, and The History of a Literary Radical and Other Essays (1920), which contains a fragment of an unfinished autobiographical novel.