Earl Shorris, Who Fought Poverty With Knowledge, Dies at 75 Earl Shorris, a social critic and author whose interviews with prison inmates for a book inspired him to start a now nationally recognized educational program that introduces the poor and the unschooled to Plato, Kant and Tolstoy, died on May 27 in New York. The cause was complications of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, his son Anthony said. Mr. Shorris, who wrote a dozen books during the first 35 years of his career, many sharply critical of Western culture as sliding toward plutocracy and materialism, became best known in his final years for founding the Clemente Course in the Humanities. Established in 1995 with 25 students at the Roberto Clemente Family Guidance Center in the East Village of Manhattan, the program offers the disadvantaged a 10-month curriculum of philosophy, history, art, literature and logic. It earned Mr. Shorris the National Humanities Medal, presented to him in 2000 by President Bill Clinton. Since 1995, the program has been introduced in about 20 cities around the country, as well as in Canada, Australia and Korea, according to administrators of the Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities, which oversees the project. In groups of 20 to 30 students per course, several thousand have tackled the program's rigorous readings and explications of Aristotle on logic, Plato on justice and Kant's theory of morality. The program is free, and books, carfare and baby-sitting are provided. In every outpost, the target audience is the same: the poor and unemployed, low-wage workers, ex-convicts, addicts and the homeless. By Mr. Shorris's own account, the enterprise has scored many wins and many losses. Some students were inspired, some were not, some died of AIDS, and some - like Moise Koffi of the Bronx, who described himself as drifting toward poverty before taking the course 10 years ago at a community center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. - went on to earn bachelor's and graduate degrees. While education policy has leaned in recent decades toward giving students work skills, Mr. Shorris's idea was to teach what he considered the ultimate skills: reflection and critical thinking, as taught by the humanities. "If the multigenerational poor are to make the leap out of poverty, it will require a new kind of thinking - reflection," he wrote in 1997. And that is a beginning. The study of the humanities, he said, is "in itself a redistribution of wealth." As a writer, beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Shorris produced a diverse body of work, including sociological examinations of the American way of employment and commerce, magazine journalism on the demise of the hippie counterculture of the 1960s, learned volumes on Latino history and identity, and social commentaries that appeared regularly in Harper's Magazine and were broadcast on National Public Radio. His novels were known for their dark humor. In one of his earliest, "The Boots of the Virgin" (1968), Mr. Shorris mined his brief career during the late 1950s as a bullfighter in Mexico to portray his antihero, Sol Feldman, a Jewish bullfighter of little talent known professionally as El Sol de Michigan. In two books of nonfiction, "The Oppressed Middle: Politics of Middle Management" (1981) and "A Nation of Salesmen: The Tyranny of the Market and the Subversion of Culture" (1994), he drew on his work during the 1970s as an executive for the national advertising firm N. W. Ayer and Sons, where he handled the General Motors and American Telephone & Telegraph accounts. But he was not happy in advertising, he wrote, describing it as "not immoral, except as waste is immoral." It was while researching a book published in 1997, "New American Blues: A Journey Through Poverty to Democracy," that Mr. Shorris happened upon the vocation that would occupy his last years. He was interviewing inmates at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, N.Y., asking for their opinions on why poor people were poor. One inmate, Viniece Walker, told him it was because they lacked "the moral life of downtown" - meaning, she said, exposure to "plays, museums, concerts, lectures, you know." "You mean the humanities," Mr. Shorris replied, surprised by her answer. "Yes, Earl, the humanities," she said. Ms. Walker's words triggered an epiphany of sorts, Mr. Shorris wrote in a 1997 Harper's essay: Poverty was an absence of reflection and beauty, not an absence of money. It was comparable to the experience of people chained to the wall of the cave in Plato's Allegory of the Cave, he said: They see shadows on the walls, and assume that is all there is in the world. At the first Clemente Course meeting, "I passed out their reading assignment. Of course, it was the Allegory of the Cave," he wrote. Earl Shorris was born in Chicago on June 25, 1936, the son Samuel and Betty Shorris, and moved to El Paso as a child with his family. His father worked in the insurance business. At 13, Mr. Shorris was admitted on a full scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he was deeply influenced by the so-called Great Books model of higher education introduced in the 1940s by the university's longtime president, Robert Maynard Hutchins. He left before graduating, however, and worked as a newspaper reporter and freelance writer - with a stint bullfighting in Juarez, across the border from El Paso, during his early 20s - before settling with his wife, Sylvia, in San Francisco. Besides his wife and his son Anthony, Mr. Shorris is survived by another son, James; a sister, Mary Jean Roberts; and four grandchildren. The Clemente Course "changed the direction of my life," said Mr. Koffi, an immigrant from Ivory Coast. I was in darkness, like the man in the story of the cave, and my mind was opened.