author
Max Pearson Cushing
1886–1951
A scholar of the French Enlightenment, he is best remembered for a clear, compact study of Baron d'Holbach and the radical ideas that helped shape the world before the French Revolution. His career also reached beyond academia, including wartime intelligence work and later service as a cathedral musician.
1 Audiobook
Baron d'Holbach : a Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France
by Max Pearson Cushing
About the author
Born in Bangor, Maine, in 1886, Max Pearson Cushing was an American educator and author whose best-known work is Baron d'Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France. Records surfaced through library and book sources identify him as a Bowdoin College graduate (1909) who went on to earn both an A.M. (1912) and a Ph.D. (1914) from Columbia University.
Before and after writing his doctoral study, he appears to have built a varied career in teaching and scholarship. Available biographical notes say he taught at Robert College in Constantinople, held academic posts in the United States, and served overseas in Army Intelligence during World War I.
Later in life, Cushing was also known as an organist and choirmaster; one source says he became organist and choirmaster at the National Cathedral in Washington in 1942. He died in New York in 1951. While only a small amount of biographical detail is easy to confirm today, his surviving book remains a useful window into Enlightenment thought and eighteenth-century French radicalism.