A professor of history at Columbia College for many years, he published more than forty books, was awarded the American Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was designated a knight of the French Legion of Honor.

His father was a member of the Abbaye de Créteil group of artists and writers, and also worked in the French Ministry of Labor.

[4] His parents' Paris home was frequented by many modernist artists of Belle Époque France, such as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the Cubist painters Albert Gleizes and Marcel Duchamp, the composer Edgard Varèse, and the writers Richard Aldington and Stefan Zweig.

[4] While on a diplomatic mission to the United States during the First World War (1914–1918), Barzun's father so liked the country he decided that his son should receive an American university education; thus, the twelve-year-old Jacques Martin attended Lycée Janson-de-Sailly until moving to America, where he graduated from Harrisburg Technical High School in 1923 and then went off to Columbia University, where he obtained a liberal arts education.

[13] Naming Edward Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt and Thomas Babington Macaulay as his intellectual ancestors, and calling him "one of the West's most eminent historians of culture" and "a champion of the liberal arts tradition in higher education," who "deplored what he called the 'gangrene of specialism'", The Daily Telegraph remarked, "The sheer scope of his knowledge was extraordinary.

"[14] Essayist Joseph Epstein, remembering him in the Wall Street Journal as a "flawless and magisterial" writer who tackled "Darwin, Marx, Wagner, Berlioz, William James, French verse, English prose composition, university teaching, detective fiction, [and] the state of intellectual life", described Barzun as a tall, handsome man with an understated elegance, thoroughly Americanized, but retaining an air of old-world culture, cosmopolitan in an elegant way rare for intellectuals".

[15] Over seven decades, Barzun wrote and edited more than forty books touching on an unusually broad range of subjects, including science and medicine, psychiatry from Robert Burton through William James to modern methods, and art, and classical music; he was one of the all-time authorities on Hector Berlioz.

Some of his books—particularly Teacher in America and The House of Intellect—enjoyed a substantial lay readership and influenced debate about culture and education far beyond the realm of academic history.

[18] He edited and wrote the introduction to the 1961 anthology, The Delights of Detection, which included stories by G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Rex Stout, and others.

The resulting book of more than 800 pages, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present, revealed a vast erudition and brilliance undimmed by advanced age.

Historians, literary critics, and popular reviewers all lauded From Dawn to Decadence as a sweeping and powerful survey of modern Western history, and it became a New York Times bestseller.

[23] Reviewing it in the New York Times, historian William Everdell called the book "a great achievement" by a scholar "undiminished in his scholarship, research and polymathic interests," while also scrutinizing Barzun's scant treatment of figures like Walt Whitman and Karl Marx.

"[25] As late as October 2011, one month before his 104th birthday, he reviewed Adam Kirsch's Why Trilling Matters for the Wall Street Journal.