Stringfellow Barr (January 15, 1897 – February 3, 1982) was an American 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 wrote compact yet lucid historical surveys of three major periods of western history.
"[1] 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," along with Carey McWilliams and Thomas Emerson.
"[2] Barr's views on the poor quality of American education and an American society driven by consumerist ideology are presented in ironic terms in Purely Academic (1958), a classic academic novel set in an anonymous Corn Belt university during the McCarthy period, as when a character in the story says that In 1959, Barr was one of a number of signatories to a petition asking the U. S. Congress to abolish the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.
New York Times reviewer Edmund Fuller called his 1958 novel, Purely Academic, "bitterly hilarious," "sadistically satirical," and "funny and appalling.