Erik Barnouw

Erik Barnouw (June 23, 1908 – July 19, 2001) was a U.S. historian of radio and television broadcasting.

According to the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Erik Barnouw was born in Den Haag in the Netherlands, the son of Adriaan (a history teacher), and Ann Eliza Barnouw (who tutored English). The Barnouws came to America in 1919, after the end of World War I when his father became one of the editors of the Weekly Review and later was the Queen Wilhelmina Professor at Columbia University. Erik attended Horace Mann School in New York City. Barnouw, thereafter, went to Princeton University where he was an editor of the Nassau Literary Magazine and collaborated with Joshua Logan on the Princeton Triangle Club's musical play Zuider Zee , after the success of his play Open Collars , which he wrote for Princeton's Theatre Intime and which spoofed undergraduate life at the University. In the spring of his junior year, he and fellow Princetonian Bretaigne Windust, together with Harvard juniors Charles Crane Leatherbee and Kingsley Perry, contributed $100 each towards founding the University Players, a summer stock company in West Falmouth on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Over the course of 5 summers on Cape Cod and two winter seasons in Baltimore, Maryland, this company gave the professional start to the acting careers of such future stars as Margaret Sullavan, Henry Fonda, Joshua Logan, Myron McCormick, Kent Smith, James Stewart, and Mildred Natwick among others.

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