J. C. Furnas; Writer Spanned U.S. History

Joseph Chamberlain “J.C.” Furnas, a prolific and eclectic writer who penned one of the most heavily circulated and influential articles ever printed as well as a highly lauded three-volume social history of America, has died. He was 95.

Furnas died June 3 at his home in Stanton, N.J.

The versatile writer’s oft-reprinted magazine article, “ . . . And Sudden Death,” has been touted by consumer advocate Ralph Nader and helped bring about improved safety of automobiles and highways.

Originally published in Reader’s Digest in August 1935, the sober piece detailed automobile fatalities and the need for safety on the road. The magazine sent copies to 5,000 publications and eventually issued 8 million reprints.

“The idea for the article was not mine,” Furnas told The Times in 1936 during a stop in Los Angeles on a world tour. “The editor of Reader’s Digest suggested that we might scare people into realization of the danger.

“Every detail was authentic,” he added, “gathered from highway police, doctors, ambulance drivers and hospital attendants. There was no need for imagination. The real picture was worse than I had anticipated.”

Furnas’ far tougher assignment also began in the mind of somebody else--Walter Minton of G.P. Putnam’s Sons publishers. The task was to do a comprehensive social history of the United States spanning four centuries. Furnas was so dumbfounded by the gargantuan concept that he declined, walking out of the publisher’s office.

But he eventually undertook the project, and over 13 years produced three insightful volumes. Informal in style--Furnas described the writing as “free association”--the books were: “A Social History of the United States, 1587-1914,” published in 1969; “Great Times: An Informal Social History of the United States, 1914-1929,” published in 1974; and “Stormy Weather,” covering 1929 to 1945 and published in 1978.

Unconventional in content and approach, the books covered such things as the origin of pink lemonade, why Americans spell some words differently than the British and the evolution of women’s suffrage, and included anecdotes gleaned from the author’s scrutinizing of early motion pictures.

Born in Indianapolis and educated at Harvard, Furnas wrote myriad articles for the American Scholar, Reader’s Digest, the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s and Look.

He wrote more than a dozen books, ranging from history to biography to novels and early how-to tomes like his 1939 “So You’re Going to Stop Smoking!”

Among the biographies was one of 19th-century actress Fanny Kemble in 1982 and, three decades earlier, “Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson.”

In reviewing the earlier biography for The Times in 1951, Don Guzman wrote: “Despite frequent writing with the fist, and many passages so tortuous they cannot be followed easily, J.C. Furnas has done the finest biography Robert Louis Stevenson has received. . . .

“ ‘Voyage to Windward’ is rich in research among letters and documents hitherto not available,” he continued. “It has been six years in the writing, with trips to almost every spot Stevenson touched; and it is done by the man who wrote one of the best accounts of life in the South Seas [Furnas’ 1948 ‘Anatomy of Paradise’], an important background for anyone who tries to re-create RLS. . . . The reader at once enters into a world of real people, and for 500 pages never leaves that world.”

Furnas chronicled his own past whimsically in the 1989 autobiography, “My Life in Writing: Memoirs of a Maverick.” It was praised by one reviewer as “an unpredictable mix of self-confidence and self-effacement . . . just cantankerous enough to hold us in thrall.”

Among Furnas’ nonfiction works was the 1956 “Goodbye to Uncle Tom,” which discussed the history of the slave movement from Africa to America.

Furnas’ novels included “The Prophet’s Chamber,” “The Devil’s Rainbow” and “Lightfoot Island.”

Widowed in 1985, Furnas is survived by a stepdaughter, Anne F. Stuck.