I met Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago in 1956, in a class on Plato’s Republic. Allan already had his Ph.D. from the university’s Committee on Social Thought, but he kept right on coming to classes while teaching adult education courses downtown in the university’s Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults. He was very much at home in the place, for, as he wrote three decades later in The Closing of the American Mind, ” When I was fifteen years old I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life.” It was surely more of a home to him than the Indianapolis of his birth.

A home is not a house, and the young man I observed in class that day did not appear to be quite housebroken. He looked gawky and disheveled; the natty dresser of later years was still a bit of a slob. What one noticed most about him, however, was not his attire, nor even the mobile look of somebody who thought with his whole face, but his sheer volubility. The words tumbled out of him so fast they often bumped into each other; he would shift from loudness to whispering to sputtering without warning. What is more, his words generated gestures that almost amounted to a language unto themselves.