Stringfellow Barr

Who was Stringfellow Barr?

Stringfellow Barr was an historian, author, and former president of St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he, together with Scott Buchanan, instituted the Great Books curriculum.

Barr was the editor of Virginia Quarterly Review from 1931–1937. He established and was president of the Foundation for World Government from 1948 to 1958. In the 1950s he taught classics at Rutgers College in Newark, New Jersey.

Barr wrote compact yet lucid historical surveys of three major periods of western history. Two of his books, The Will of Zeus and The Mask of Jove deal with the Greeks and Romans, respectively. He also wrote The Pilgrimage of Western Man, dealing with western history from the Renaissance through the early post-World War II era.

His nickname was "Winkie".

In a 1951 New York Post column, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. mocked Barr as belonging to the "solve-the-Russian-problem-by-giving-them-money school," and said, of him and two others, "None of these gentlemen is a Communist, but none of them objects very much to Communism. They are the Typhoid Marys of the left, bearing the germs of the infection even if not suffering obviously from the disease."