TV & Radio: The Wizard of Quiz

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"A Bunch of Uncles." For his freakish TV success and, more important, for being the remarkable young man he is, Charles Van Doren owes most to the remarkable Van Doren family (see box). Says a friend: "I have always thought the Van Dorens the most successful family I've ever experienced in terms of closeness, intellectual vitality, mutual respect, in terms of exchange of ideas and the flow of electricity that keeps everybody learning all the time. Charlie spent his whole life saturated in this sort of thing." His father is Mark Van Doren, 62, Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and professor of English at Columbia; his mother, Dorothy, is a onetime editor (on The Nation) who has published five novels; his late Uncle Carl, whom he idolized, was a Pulitzer Prize biographer, a topflight literary critic and, like Mark, a prolific man of letters who wrote in virtually every form that exists between covers.

Mark's family shuttled between a sprawling 18th century farmhouse on 150 acres in Cornwall, Conn, and a house on Greenwich Village's Bleecker Street, where an evening's conversation struck sparks from a roomful of such guests as Carl, Mortimer Adler, Clifton Fadiman, Critic Joseph Wood Krutch, Columnist Franklin P. Adams, Lawyer Morris L. Ernst, Novelist Sinclair Lewis. "We'd be talking along," recalls Fadiman, "and then we'd look up and there would be two little kids in pajamas, hanging over the banister, eavesdropping." Charles's mother would pack him and his younger brother John, now 28 and an instructor in American civilization at Brandeis University, off to bed. But Charlie never stood in awe of the guests. "They were like a bunch of uncles to him," says Fadiman. As a tot, Charlie played with Philosopher Adler at a highbrow game of "neologizing" (inventing words in sentences to sound like a foreign language). As a youth, he played word games with Cornwall Neighbor James Thurber, who was so taken with Van Doren's acting skill ten years ago as the lead in an amateur production of The Male Animal that he recently began trying—before Charlie became famous—to persuade him to take a role in a play he is preparing for Broadway next season.