Crispin Sartwell
Crispin Sartwell (b. 1958) is an American philosophy professor and journalist. He received his B.A. from the University of Maryland, College Park, his M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and is currently a member of the faculty of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
Born in Washington, D.C., he is the son of the late Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, a reporter, editor, and photographer with the Washington Star and several magazines. His grandfather, also Franklin Gallagher Sartwell, was a columnist and editorial page editor at the Washington Times-Herald. His great-grandfather, Herman Bernstein broke the story of a secret alliance between Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas during World War I in the New York Times. Sartwell himself worked as a copy boy at the Washington Star and later as a freelance rock critic for many publications, including Record Magazine and Melody Maker. He has taught philosophy, communication and political science at a number of schools, including Vanderbilt University, The University of Alabama, Penn State, and The Maryland Institute College of Art.
He is married to the writer Marion Winik.
Sartwell's syndicated column, distributed by Creators Syndicate, has appeared in numerous newspapers through the 1990s and 2000s, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and Los Angeles Times. Among the most idiosyncratic newspaper columnists of the period, he is a self-described adherent of anarchism. He is the author of such books as Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality and Six Names of Beauty.