Richard M. Weaver

Richard Malcolm Weaver was born in 1910 in Asheville, North Carolina, and grew up in Kentucky after his father's death. He studied at the University of Kentucky, where he joined the American Socialist Party for a time, and earned a master's degree at Vanderbilt University, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom and was influenced by the Southern Agrarians, writers who defended traditional rural life against industrialism. After teaching at Auburn and Texas A&M, he earned a doctorate at Louisiana State University with a dissertation on the culture of the American South. From 1944 until his death he taught English at the University of Chicago, where he was known as a demanding teacher of rhetoric and composition. In Ideas Have Consequences (1948) he argued that Western culture had declined since the late Middle Ages, when thinkers abandoned the belief in universal truths, and he called for a return to respect for truth, property and language. The book became an important early work of the postwar conservative movement. He also wrote The Ethics of Rhetoric (1953). He died in Chicago in 1963.

Richard M. Weaver is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: A non-practicing Protestant who valued the South's 'older religiousness'. Source: Wikipedia