June 12, 2001

J. C. Furnas, Wry Historian of American Life, Dies at 95
By THE NEW YORK TIMES

J. C. Furnas, a writer and social historian, died on June 3 at his home in
Stanton, N.J. He was 95.

Mr. Furnas was a longtime contributor to The American Scholar and wrote
prolifically for newspapers, including The New York Times, and magazines
like The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, Look and Reader's Digest.

Mr. Furnas's most famous article, ". . . And Sudden Death," a somber piece
on automobile fatalities and the need for safe driving, was published in
Reader's Digest in August 1935 and became perhaps the most widely circulated
article ever written. Proofs were sent to 5,000 publications, and the
magazine ultimately issued eight million reprints. A favorite of Ralph
Nader, it was credited with inspiring the automobile industry to subsidize
safety measures and the Transportation Department to revise highway
engineering.

But Mr. Furnas's greatest undertaking may have been an informal three-volume
social history of Americans from 1587 to 1945, a project he initially
resisted when it was suggested to him in 1965 by Walter Minton of G. P.
Putnam's Sons. "I walked out of the office," Mr. Furnas recalled in 1978. 

Thirteen years, three books and a half-million words after his abrupt
departure, he had produced one of publishing's most comprehensive history
projects, written in a style he called "free association." 

The volumes were "The Americans: A Social History of the United States,
1587-1914" (1969), whose topics ranged from the origin of pink lemonade to
why Americans do not spell honor and glamor with a u, as the British do;
"Great Times: An Informal Social History of the United States, 1914-1929"
(1974), which covered the years between the outbreak of war and the stock
market crash, including the federal temperance law and women's suffrage; and
"Stormy Weather" (1978), which spanned 1929 to 1945 and offered anecdotal
material culled from hours spent watching 1930's movies.

Mr. Furnas was born in Indianapolis and graduated from Harvard. His wife,
Helen, who was his researcher and copy editor, died in 1985. He is survived
by a stepdaughter, Anne F. Stuck of Charlotte, N.C., and a niece, Anne
Harris of Ashland, Ore.

Mr. Furnas reminisced about his career, which included a World War II tour
of duty in the South Pacific, in his 1989 autobiography, "My Life in
Writing: Memoirs of a Maverick."

He also produced biographies of the 19th-century actress Fanny Kemble (1982)
and the writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1951), which a reviewer in The New
York Times called "the best and most complete biography of Stevenson yet
written."

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company