"The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat," by Thomas McNamee The richest, most influential restaurant owners lived in fear of a single critic's word, a man whose enthusiastic home visit to an amateur's kitchen might well inspire a lucrative career as a cookbook writer. Drawing on his limitless budget, he could roam the earth and report back on what he found. Craig Claiborne and the American Food Renaissance By Thomas McNamee Free Press. $27. Ah, for the good old days! They in fact barely existed, but it's nice to have an account of the brief moment when they did: the decades when postwar prosperity and its resulting conformity had grown sufficiently stultifying that the American bourgeoisie were emboldened to venture beyond the food they knew - to be guided by Craig Claiborne, who soon after being hired by The New York Times in 1957 set about creating the template for informed, impassioned food journalism we still recognize today. Claiborne's enormous influence - signaled by the title Thomas McNamee has given his new biography, "The Man Who Changed the Way We Eat" - was due to good timing, but also to his eccentric and willful imagination, his openness to the cuisines of the world, high and low, and not incidentally to his enormous capacity for hard work. And, of course, to the influence wielded by his employer - and that expense account. A withdrawn Mississippi boy who was never really comfortable in his own skin, Claiborne liked to suggest that he pretty much fell into his position at The Times after writing a few articles for Gourmet magazine about the interest he had developed in food during his years in the Navy and his stint at a Swiss hotel school. But in fact he lobbied for the job with fierce and focused ambition, researching anyone he was likely to meet at the paper. With Turner Catledge, then the managing editor, he feigned casual surprise at having lived in the same dorm as Catledge at Mississippi State College - a lie worthy of "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." Once hired, Claiborne was prodigiously productive. With the almost unknown freedom not to worry about pleasing advertisers, he began dining anonymously and writing frank judgments of New York restaurants, a form of criticism that the paper had never previously run. Open as he was, Claiborne was clear in his preferences. In his view, the apex of what fine dining could be was the fantastically expensive restaurant Le Pavillon, the redoubt of a style of classic, formal cuisine and service that was appealingly disciplined (Claiborne liked order, McNamee points out, both in the Navy and at hotel school) although already starting to seem preposterously stuffy. Claiborne had a flair both for showmanship - he hosted long, Lucullan dinners at the two Hamptons houses he built near his longtime collaborator, Pierre Franey - and for publicity. Yet that didn't extend to a drive for personal celebrity of the kind that his forerunner and rival, James Beard, sought so avidly and that Julia Child, whose career Claiborne helped get started, both earned and enjoyed. Claiborne was, perhaps, too uncomfortable with himself to nurture a popular persona. Although he was unusually open about being gay, he was never really fulfilled in love, a sad underscore of the book. This relative reticence might also have been the reason he created so many stars - Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Diana Kennedy, Maida Heatter. And he drank, an addiction that became ruinous. As we see him here, Claiborne was a fugitive, sad, rather unpleasant fellow. He liked luxury, especially in travel and of course in food. His friendship was erratic, conditional and intemperate. He quickly took up with chefs, home cooks and publicists, but just as quickly cut ties without a thought. The most troubling tie was to his ­mother - a character straight out of Tennessee Williams, who married too young and after her Southern businessman husband lost everything in the "20s, had to put her own training as a cook to use in boardinghouses and fraternities, always with the airs of an aristocrat. During a visit to New York, when she was beginning to enjoy the success she might have dreamed of for herself but doubtless ­enjoyed for her son's sake, Claiborne ­decided he could no longer bear her smothering love. He told her he never wanted to see her again, and for the rest of his life he was as good as his word, refusing even to attend her funeral. Corby Kummer is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of "The Joy of Coffee."