Charles Van Doren, a Columbia University English instructor and a member of a distinguished literary family who confessed to Congress and a disillusioned nation in 1959 that his performances on a television quiz show had been rigged, died on Tuesday in Canaan, Conn. His father was Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, literary critic and professor of English at Columbia. His mother, Dorothy Van Doren, was a novelist and editor. And his uncle, Carl Van Doren, had been a professor of literature, a historian and a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer. Charles himself had bachelor’s and master’s degrees, a $4,400-a-year position at Columbia and an honest look about him.

Source: New York Times April 10, 2019 14:31 UTC