After 49 years Charles Van Doren opens up . . .

At the 2001 memorial service of Mortimer Adler, a close friend of Van Doren's father, the famous writer and poet Mark Van Doren, the disgraced son talked of "the time when I fell down, face down in the mud, and [Adler] picked me up, brushed me off, and gave me a job." I interviewed Van Doren about Adler last year, and he called the late 1950s the time "when my life changed." He said he was working on a memoir, which he declined to discuss.