Archives
Obituaries
David Bazelon, former English faculty member
David T. Bazelon, a former UB faculty member, died on May 2 in his retirement residence in Madison, Wis. He was 82.
A writer, social critic and teacher of political science, Bazelon was a corporate lawyer practicing in Manhattan before he switched to writing and teaching.
A native of Shreveport, La., Bazelon studied at the University of Virginia, the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago before graduating from Columbia University in 1949. After graduating from Yale Law School in 1953, he practiced corporate law at two large Manhattan firms until he quit in 1958.
As a freelance writer, he had hundreds of articles, reviews and essays published in such national periodicals as Partisan Review, Dissent, Commentary, The Reporter and The New York Review of Books.
During the 1960s, he was a visiting fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a visiting professor at the Rutgers University School of Law and a Guggenheim scholar. He joined the UB faculty in 1969, serving as a professor of policy sciences and English until his retirement in 1985.
He published numerous books, including "The Paper Economy," "Power in America: The Politics of the New Class," and "Nothing But a Fine Tooth Comb: Essays in Social Criticism." He also was a writer and consultant for the movie "Point of Order," a 1964 documentary drawn from the television coverage of the Senate's Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954.
His papers, including correspondence with his uncle, the late David L. Bazelon, a federal appeals judge who encouraged him in his professional endeavors, are housed in the University of Delaware Library.