His 1971 novel became a movie, with John Houseman giving an award-winning performance as the imperious Professor Kingsfield, and later a television series.
John Jay Osborn Jr., who while attending Harvard Law School wrote “The Paper Chase,” a 1971 novel following the tense relationship between an earnest student and his imperious contract law professor that was made into a feature film and then a television series, died on Oct. 19 at his home in San Francisco. He was 77.
His daughter, Meredith Osborn, said the cause was squamous cell cancer.
“The Paper Chase,” Mr. Osborn’s best-known book, tells the story of two antagonists: Kingsfield, an austere, curmudgeonly Harvard elder, and Hart, an industrious first-year student from the Midwest who is trying to survive the cutthroat intellectual world of an elite law school.
“For days I sit in that damn class,” Hart says to his girlfriend, who is Kinsgfield’s daughter, late in the novel. “Then I read his books in the library and I abstract the cases he’s chosen. I know everything about him. The stripe of his ties. How many suits he has. He’s like the air or the wind. He’s everywhere. You can say you don’t care, but he’s there anyway, pounding his mind into mine. He screws around with my life.”
Although Mr. Osborn said that Kingsfield was a composite of several of his law professors, Martha Minow, a former dean of the law school, said in an email, “I do know that some now long-gone law professors here vied over who was the real model for Kingsfield.”
When “The Paper Chase” was made into a film in 1973, Kingsfield was played by John Houseman, who was a longtime theater, film and television producer and a former colleague of Orson Welles’s but had only occasionally acted, and Hart was portrayed by Timothy Bottoms. Mr. Houseman won the Academy Award for best supporting actor.
In the movie, which was written and directed by James Bridges, Kingsfield famously tells his class: “You teach yourself the law but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush. You leave thinking like a lawyer.”
Mr. Houseman reprised his role in the series that ran, first on CBS and later on Showtime, between 1978 and 1986. James Stephens took on the role of Hart.
“The Paper Chase” was a reflection of Mr. Osborn’s experiences at Harvard Law amid an era of fervent student protests over the Vietnam War.
The school “did not have the flexibility to allow individuals to express themselves,” he wrote in the Harvard Law Bulletin in 2003. “It did not allow for reciprocity between faculty and students. In short, it really had no desire to be loved, or even to be respected.”
“The Paper Chase” started as a required third-year writing project. Because it was a work of fiction, Mr. Osborn used it to hedge against following the career path to a major Wall Street firm that Harvard Law was preparing him for.
“It was an attempt to create more options for myself, a new story with a new ending,” he wrote in 2011 in the preface to the 40th-anniversary edition of the book.
He went outside the law school to find an adviser, William Alfred, a Harvard English literature professor who was also a poet and playwright. Ms. Osborn recalled her father saying that Mr. Alfred was effusive about the first rough draft but suggested some changes.
When he made the fixes, she said, Mr. Alfred told him: “Thank goodness. It was terrible when you first gave it to me. Now it’s a lot better and it’s got a lot of promise.”
A year after Mr. Osborn’s graduation in 1970, Houghton Mifflin published “The Paper Chase.”
Reviewing “The Paper Chase” in The Philadelphia Inquirer, David Appel wrote that it was written in a “lean, forthright manner” that “captured the urgency and immediacy of the law school experience.”
For the rest of his career, Mr. Osborn would balance writing novels, as well as television and film scripts, with teaching law — even, like Kingsfield, contract law.
John Jay Osborn Jr. was born on Aug. 5, 1945, in Boston. His father was a doctor and an inventor of one of the first heart-lung machines. His mother, Ann (Kidder) Osborn, was an abstract painter. The Osborns are descendants of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad baron.
In 1967, Mr. Osborn graduated from Harvard College, where he had met Emilie Sisson, a student at Radcliffe College, whom he married in 1968.
“As a jaded graduate of Harvard College,” he wrote in 2011 of his law school experience, “all I wanted was not to be browbeaten (and I was).”
After Harvard Law, Mr. Osborn clerked in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., for Judge Max Rosenn of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He then worked for about a year as an associate at the white-shoe law firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler in Manhattan.
He left for postgraduate work at Yale Law School, then taught law, first at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University and then at the University of Miami School of Law. At about the same time, he was writing novels: “The Only Thing I’ve Done Wrong” (1977), a family drama, and “The Associates” (1979), about life at a Wall Street law firm.
A sitcom based on “The Associates,” starring Martin Short, Alley Mills and Wilfrid Hyde-White, made its debut in 1979. But it lasted only 13 episodes.
Between 1978 and 1988, Mr. Osborn was credited with writing 14 episodes of “The Paper Chase” and one episode apiece of “L.A. Law” and “Spenser: For Hire.” In that period, he also wrote his fourth novel, “The Man Who Owned New York” (1981), about a lawyer trying to recover $3 million missing from the estate of his firm’s biggest client.
In the 1990s, he became a private estate planner and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and then at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he taught contract law until his retirement in 2016.
His approach to teaching contract law was quite different from Kingsfield’s. The balance of power, he wrote, rested with the students, not the professor. He said that in his first class of each semester, he stood at the lectern until the students were totally silent.
“I explain to them that I’m not going to call on anyone,” he wrote in 2011. “They will have to volunteer to talk. Why am I not going to just call on students? I am not clairvoyant like their other professors. I have no idea which students have something to contribute to the discussion. Therefore I’m going to have to rely on them to tell when they have something to say.”
Two years after his retirement, he published his final novel, “Listen to the Marriage” (2018), set entirely in the office of a marriage counselor.
In addition to his daughter, who graduated from Harvard Law in 2006, Mr. Osborn is survived by his wife, a retired doctor; his sons, Samuel and Frederick; six grandchildren; his brothers, Oliver, Joseph and Ed; and his sisters, Mimi Oliver, Cindi Garvie and Anne Weiser-Truchan.
At the end of Mr. Osborn’s novel, Hart stops Kingsfield on campus to tell him how much his class had meant to him.
“Good,” Kingsfield says. “That’s fine.” And, as the professor starts to smile, he asks, coldly, “What was your name?”
“Hart, Mr. Hart,” Hart says.
“Well, thank you, Mr. Hart,” Kingsfield says.
Mr. Osborn, who was a technical adviser for the “Paper Chase” film, recalled that at their first meeting, Mr. Houseman asked him if Kingsfield really knew Hart’s name.
“Of course he had to know it,” Mr. Osborn told SFGate.com in 2003. “But I think the ambiguity was important, and Houseman understood that.”
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
