Nathaniel Burt (November 21, 1913, Jackson Hole, Wyoming – July 1, 2003, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American composer, teacher, poet, novelist and social historian.[1] A lecturer at Princeton University and Westminster Choir College, he is best remembered for his 1963 New York Times bestseller, The Perennial Philadelphians.[2]
He was the son of writers Struthers Burt and Katharine Newlin Burt. His father grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a prominent lawyer, and was a graduate of Princeton and Oxford University. A published poet and novelist, Struthers became a Wyoming rancher. Burt's mother wrote Western novels and short stories, several of which were adapted into screenplays for early films.[3] They operated the Bar B C Dude Ranch, outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he was born in 1913.[4] He had a younger sister, Julia Burt Atteberry (1915–1986).[5] Among their neighbors was novelist (and Philadelphian) Owen Wister, who owned a nearby ranch.[6]
Burt's parents lived in Southern Pines, North Carolina during the winters, where he attended elementary school. He was sent to boarding school at The Saint James School in Hagerstown, Maryland,[7] and graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1931. He attended Princeton University for a year, before dropping out and teaching in the Hoboken, New Jersey public schools.[8] He completed an undergraduate degree at New York University's Mannes School of Music in 1939, and returned to Princeton to teach music theory in the Department of Music, 1939–1941. He joined the U.S. Navy in 1942, spent World War II in the Pacific theatre, and was discharged in 1945 as a lieutenant.
He returned to Princeton after the war, and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in music in 1949. His compositions included ballet, choral, orchestral, and piano music. He taught simultaneously at Princeton and Westminster Choir College, and was co-founder of the Princeton Chamber Orchestra.
Burt completed two books of poetry: Rooms in a House (1947) and Questions on a Kite (1950). He gave up teaching in 1952 to concentrate full time on writing. His first novel, Scotland's Burning (1954), was set at a boys boarding school, like the one he had attended. He wrote scholarly articles analyzing the development of drama in the libretti of early Italian operas.
Burt spent six years researching and writing The Perennial Philadelphians, a 625-page social history of the city's upper class from the 17th century to the 20th.[9] Having grown up in Wyoming, North Carolina and Maryland, he was considered an outsider, "but Mr. Burt's roots led back to an old Philadelphia family much like those he chronicled." With "biting social commentary," he traced how the great fortunes had been made (and preserved, or squandered), in "a genteel society of inherited wealth that views ambition as vulgar and not very nice." Burt wittily deciphered Old Philadelphia for the general reader:
Philadelphians are house snobs in more ways than one; in the old days when Everybody lived in town, at least in winter, not only how one lived, but where, could mean the difference between social life and death. Market Street was the "tracks" and if you lived "North of Market" you were on the wrong side of them! "Nobody lived there."
The right side of the tracks, the only area of the city that Old Philadelphia considered really Philadelphia, is that narrow belt that extends from the Delaware to the Schuylkill south of Market and north of Lombard. The rhyme "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and Pine; Market, Arch, Race and Vine" expressed the ultimate limits, north and south, of an Old Philadelphian's personal knowledge of the city — and Race and Vine Streets were only included because of the rhyme.
It is not that they don't know that this Greater Philadelphia exists; in fact many of them, particularly historically-minded older gentlemen, have a sort of a benevolent curiosity about it, the feeling a birdwatcher has for some particularly busy bog; they know about the people that live there, but they don't and won't actually know the odd specimens inhabiting this swamp that surrounds the walled bastion, the Inner, the Forbidden City, of real Philadelphia, their own narrow historical, hereditary waistband.
The Perennial Philadelphians received a highly favorable review in the New York Times Book Review,[10] and made the New York Times bestseller list.[11] Burt later wrote: "My best known book, like my father's has been a book about Philadelphia — precisely that Philadelphia from which my father and [Owen] Wister escaped to go West. Since I have never actually lived in Philadelphia, it has had something of the exotic glamour for me that Wyoming had for Wister."[12]
Burt served on the board of directors of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia for many years, and was elected a Life Fellow. He was also a member of Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Club (defunct). He served on the Board of Directors of The Historical Society of Princeton, and contributed to its scholarly journal, Princeton History.[13] He was a member of the Princeton Club of New York, and the Century Association.
He married Margaret "Winkie" Clinton (1917–2013), of Barnstable, Massachusetts, on August 5, 1941.[14] The couple had two children, and lived in Princeton for more than 50 years. They attended Trinity Episcopal Church—where he sang in the choir and she was a member of the altar guild—and he was co-author of a 1982 history of the church.[15] They were married for 62 years, until his death in 2003. Their son, Christopher C. Burt, is a writer and publisher, author of Extreme Weather: A Guide and Record Book (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2004).[16]
Nathaniel and Margaret Burt are buried with his parents and sister at Aspen Hill Cemetery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming.[17]
Burt's papers are at Princeton University, including the diaries he kept for 70 years. He left his musical compositions and music library to Westminster Choir College, now part of Rider University.[18]