Charles Van Doren

Charles Van Doren
Charles Van Doren (right), with Vivienne Nearing and Jack Barry on Twenty One
Born	Charles Lincoln Van Doren (1926-02-12) February 12, 1926 (age 90) New York, New York
Known for	1950s quiz show scandals
Parent(s)	Mark Van Doren Dorothy Graffe

Charles Lincoln Van Doren (born February 12, 1926) is an American intellectual, writer, and editor who was involved in a television quiz show scandal in the 1950s. In 1959 he testified before the United States Congress that he had been given the correct answers by the producers of the show Twenty One.

The son of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and literary critic/teacher Mark Van Doren and novelist and writer Dorothy Van Doren, and nephew of critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Carl Van Doren, Charles Van Doren was a committed academic with an unusually broad range of interests. He graduated from The High School of Music & Art and then earned a B.A. degree in Liberal Arts (1946) from St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, as well as an M.A. in astrophysics (1949) and a Ph.D. in English (1955), both at Columbia University. He was also a student at Cambridge University in England.

In 1962, Van Doren wrote an article about encyclopedias called The Idea of an Encyclopedia.

Twenty One was not Van Doren's first interest. He was long believed to have approached producers Dan Enright and Albert Freedman, originally, to appear on Tic-Tac-Dough, another game they produced. Van Doren eventually revealed—five decades after his Twenty One championship and fame, in a surprise article for The New Yorker—that he did not even own a television set, but had met Freedman through a mutual friend, with Freedman initiating the idea of Van Doren going on television by way of asking what he thought of Tic-Tac-Dough.