Regina Kühne · CC BY-SA 4.0

A philosopher and classicist who studied under Leo Strauss and taught at Cornell, Yale, and the University of Chicago, championing a Great Books education against what he saw as the intellectual relativism of American universities. His 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind became an unlikely cultural flashpoint, and his friend and colleague Saul Bellow later based the title character of his novel Ravelstein on him.