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 < back to authors list Wilbur Schramm:
Enthusiastic word spread abroad, prompting requests from scholars for copies within a week of the book's release. Demand so outstripped supply that some used copies sold at triple the retail price. Schramm revised the trail-blazing book in 1959, again combining important works from anthropology, economics, political science, psychology and sociology with material from the growing field of mass communication studies. In the meantime, in 1954, Schramm compiled another anthology, The Process and Effect of Mass Communication. Originally, P&E was intended as a research methods primer for U.S. information agency employees, but as Schramm pulled material together, it was clear the book had a larger appeal. P&E was a worthy successor to the Mass Communications anthology, but both remained in demand, and the University of Illinois Press kept reprinting. Thirty-one years after P&E's introduction, and with the second edition becoming outdated, the University of Illinois Press asked Schramm to do a third edition. His agenda full, Schramm declined, but urged that someone do a revision. "The only obligation is to make a book that will be as good for the future as P&E was for its time," he asked. Schramm was not being immodest. It was a fact, recognized everywhere, that P&E had become a mainstay in curricula of emerging mass communication departments throughout the country and abroad. Schramm's Mass Communications and The Process and Effect of Mass Communication would have established his contribution as a text and academic author, but, in a sense, they were mere warm ups. When Schramm died in 1987, his legacy included 30 books, 25 of them translated into other languages, and more than 120 research and scholarly papers and treatises. His personal papers, which his family holds, contains 18,722 pages. The largest collection in his papers is 6,158 pages for his final book, The Story of Human Communcations: Cave Painting to Microchip,,which was in press when he died. The scope of Human Communication, the whole spectrum through history, seemed an appropriate ultimate work for Wilbur Schramm, who was 80 when he died. Schramm was born is Oslo, his father a lawyer, his mother a music teacher. He developed a stutter at age 5 but excelled in sports and the flute. After college, where he studied Greek and Latin, he went to the New England Conservatory on a flute scholarship and played in the Boston Civic Symphony. He pursued a master's in American civilization at Harvard, then spent six years with the Associated Press. He went to Iowa, where he earned a doctorate in American literature and stayed on through 1941 on the faculty. For 10 years he wrote fiction for the Saturday Evening Post. His Windwagon Smith earned an O'Henry Prize. During World War II he served in the U.S. Office of War Information, then took over the University of Iowa School of Journalism. At Iowa he set up the first doctoral program in communication. From 1947 to 1955 he was at the University of Illinois, where he compiled Mass Communication: Processes and Effects..At Illinois he established the first communication research institute in the country. Schramm moved to Stanford in 1955 and developed a growing a interest in international matters. His 1964 book, Mass Media and National Development, became standard reading in diplomacy and policy-making circles around the world. At Stanford, Schramm and fellow researchers Jack Lyle and Edwin Parker conducted a massive study into the research on television's effects on children. The conclusion of Television in the Lives of Our Children is still widely cited. After retiring from Stanford in 1973, Schramm was director of the East-West Communication Institute in Honolulu. It was in Hawaii that Wilbur Schramm died, watching television one evening. On his desk were proofs for The Story of Human Communication. — reported by John Vivian, 1997 |
