The Double Life of Paul de Man

by Evelyn Barish,
The San Francisco Chronicle, May 9, 2014

On a visit to Europe in the 1960s, Alice Cook, a professor at Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, met the former chief secretary of Belgium's socialist party. She mentioned that Paul de Man, her Cornell colleague, had told her he was the son of Henri de Man, a onetime socialist politician who had turned to fascism in the 1930s and '40s. "He is not," the man replied. "He's lied again. He tells everybody lies."