John Jay Osborn Jr., author of ‘The Paper Chase’, dies at 77

Mr. Osborn wrote “Paper Hunt” as a third-year student at Harvard Law School, drawing on the personalities and teaching styles of several professors to create Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr., who ruthlessly led the contract class and inspiring.

The novel was made into a 1973 film starring John Houseman as Professor Kingsfield and Timothy Bottoms as James Hart, a Minnesota farm boy navigating the cutthroat world of students in bow ties and blazers at struggling with murky contract law. Hart also falls in love with a woman who turns out to be Kingsfield’s daughter.

Critics praised the book and film – the story was later adapted into a TV series – for bringing an unvarnished portrait of intellectual life to page and screen, as students battle their classmates and their own sanity to survive the demands of their hulking and often terrifying teachers.

“It is pleasantly free both of collegiate feeling and – in John Updike’s memorable phrase – of the low rumble of hobby horses ridden back and forth across the floor,” wrote the Washington Post book reviewer. , LJ Davis. “Rarely has the gloom and despair of American college life been portrayed with so much immediacy and truth – the paranoia, the Sisyphean effort, the illusory goals, the strange symbiosis that arises between student and professor .”

Film critic Roger Ebert observed of the film, written and directed by James Bridges, that “we hardly ever get movies about people who seem engaging enough to spend half an hour talking with”.

“The best thing about the film,” he added, “is that it considers interesting adults – young and old – in a clever way.”

Mr. Osborn was born in Boston on August 5, 1945. He was a direct descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad titan. When Mr. Osborn was 9, the family moved to the Bay Area, where his father, a physician, worked at Stanford Medical School.

After graduating from high school in 1963, Mr. Osborn enrolled at Harvard. He was, as he would later write, “an outsider” to the “legendary Eastern educational establishment”—much like Hart, but from the West Coast, not the Midwest. Mr. Osborn and Hart viewed Harvard Law School in very different ways.

“Harvard Law School is like the emerald city of Oz, or like a major European capital, like London or Paris,” Mr. Osborn said. wrote in the preface to the 40th anniversary edition of his novel. “Hart wants to go out, change, explore. Hart wants a transcendental romantic experience, right now, as a freshman law student.

Mr Osborn’s daughter Meredith said her father saw Harvard Law School as a way to avoid the Vietnam War project and, more importantly, to stay in Cambridge with his girlfriend Emilie Heffron Sisson, a student at Radcliffe College whom he married in 1968. (Unlike Hart’s girlfriend, Sisson was not the daughter of a Harvard professor, but like the character in the novel, she was an intellectual and romantic kindred spirit. )

Early in Mr. Osborn’s third year of law school, he realized, as he later wrote, that “unless I do something to change direction, I was going to end up with a comfortable job in a big law firm on Wall Street.

It was not a future that suited him.

“I had worked on Wall Street as a summer clerk and saw the job for what it was – boring and sometimes even mind-numbing,” he wrote.

“The Paper Chase” was, he wrote, “an attempt to create more options for myself, a new story with a new ending”.

For his third-year writing project, Mr. Osborn wanted to do something more creative than analytical. Told he needed to find an adviser to sponsor the effort, Mr Osborn approached William Alfred, a Harvard playwright and poet who had written “Hogan’s Goat”, a 1965 off-Broadway play starring Faye Dunaway.

Alfred helped Mr. Osborn find a publisher, and the book was quickly sold. Two years later, in 1973, it premiered on screen.

Moviegoers and critics alike were captivated by Houseman’s portrayal of Kingsfield, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. At the start of the film, the professor in the bow tie stands at the desk and states that “the study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you – unlike any schooling you have ever had. “.

As Hart had discovered on the first day of class, after which he vomited, that meant rigorous, spontaneous questioning—the Socratic method.

“I call you, ask you a question and you answer it,” says the professor. “Why don’t I just give you a lecture?” Because through my questions, you learn to educate yourself.

It was about teaching them to analyze complex sets of facts.

“In my class, there is always another question, another question following your answer,” says the teacher. “Yes, you are on a treadmill. My little questions make your mind tumble. You are on an operating table. My little questions are the fingers probing your brain. We do brain surgery here. You teach yourself a law, but I train your mind.

“The Paper Chase” has become something of a prelaw school bible that students read before embarking on a career in law. One of them was Mr. Osborn’s daughter, who enrolled at Harvard Law School in 2003. Elena Kagan, then dean of the law school and now a Supreme Court justice, was keen to tell the students that Mr. Osborn’s daughter was among their classmates.

“What my dad was describing, that sense of competition, fierceness and coldness, that was still there when I went there,” Meredith Osborn said. “But it’s all much more civilized now. That’s not to say people weren’t incredibly competitive. And there were still teachers, including Kagan, who could be quite ruthless and cold, calling them out and humiliating them if they showed up unprepared.

But that was never the whole story, she says. And his father agreed.

“Over the years, somehow, the good things I experienced in law school have come to the surface,” he wrote in 2003. “Now I think of Lon Fuller, who was a wonderful teacher, and Lloyd Weinreb, who rode through a snowstorm to my house for dinner, just because he told a student (me) that ‘he would come. And I remember Assistant Dean Stephen Bernardi, who went out of his way to find me an internship, for the sole reason that he wanted to be helpful.

In addition to writing novels and screenplays for television, Mr. Osborn has practiced contract law and taught at several universities. His works include “Listen to the wedding”, a novel set entirely in a marriage counselor’s office and episodes of several television series, including “LA Law”.

He is survived by his wife, Emilie; his daughter Meredith Osborn and two sons, Samuel Osborn and Frederick Osborn; three brothers and three sisters; and six grandchildren.

Mr. Osborn taught contract law quite differently from Kingsfield. On the first day of class, he once wrote: “I explain that I will not call anyone. They will have to volunteer if they want to talk.

“I’m not clairvoyant like their other teachers,” he added. “I have no idea which students have something to contribute to the discussion. So I will have to rely on them to tell me when they have something to say. (What I’m really doing is giving them permission to take control of the class.)”

And the students respond with confidence, raising their hands on those anxious early days.

“Months later, when it’s winter and the cases are tougher, there may be no hands up,” Mr Osborn wrote. “If that happens, I wait. Maybe I should wait thirty seconds, maybe a little longer. But someone always raises their hand to move the class forward. Someone will, even someone who isn’t sure of the answer. Why? Because then it will be clear that we are in this together. They will understand that it is their class not mine.