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Who really said it

Written Without Fear and Without Research

Not Dorothy Parker — actually Carl L. Becker Carl L. Becker 1873–1945 · American historian, professor at the University of Kansas and later Cornell
Disputed Free to reuse

Becker used the phrase in “The Reviewing of Historical Books,” printed in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914), p. 133. He was dismissing A. M. Simons’s Social Forces in American History: “not perhaps a very wise performance; written, it must be confessed, without fear and without research.” The line reached Dorothy Parker only in 1944, in an anthology, with no book and no review attached.

Last verified 3 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Written Without Fear and Without Research” Carl L. Becker, "The Reviewing of Historical Books," Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912 (Washington: GPO, 1914), p. 133 — not Dorothy Parker. · Verbatim: “written, it must be confessed, without fear and without research”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Dorothy Parker. Use the credit shown above instead.

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Free to use, including in commercial and paid presentations — no permission or licence needed.

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In context

Evoking the world of Carl L. Becker — American historian; Professor of History at the University of Kansas 1902–1916, then at Cornell 1917–1941. Theme: "Written Without Fear and Without Research". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Written Without Fear and Without Research". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The source

Paper
The Reviewing of Historical Books
Printed in
Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914), pp. 127–140
The passage
p. 133
Author
Carl Becker, then Professor of History at the University of Kansas
The book being panned
Social Forces in American History by A. M. Simons

The great books, however, are not the only ones that enlist the attention of the critical reviewer. It sometimes happens that a slight book is significant for what it points to. I have in mind, for example, the little volume of Mr. A. M. Simons, entitled “Social Forces in American History”; not perhaps a very wise performance; written, it must be confessed, without fear and without research; written nevertheless with profound conviction, and significant because it is representative of what probably passes for history among militant socialists… p. 133

Transcribed from the scanned volume at the Internet Archive, page 133. Obvious scanning artefacts in the optical character recognition have been silently corrected; the wording is otherwise as printed.

Scanned volume, full view
Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912
Quote Investigator: the full trail, 1912 to 1968

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that “historian Carl L. Becker used this expression by 1912, and currently he is the strongest candidate for originator known to QI,” adding that “Dorothy Parker may have used the expression, but the evidence is indirect, and the linkage appeared many years after the phrase was already being disseminated.”
  • We did not stop at the anchor. The 1914 volume is scanned in full at the Internet Archive ↗, and the sentence is there on page 133, in the paper “The Reviewing of Historical Books” by Carl Becker — word for word as Quote Investigator reports it.
  • It spread as a borrowed quip among historians long before Parker was named: Quote Investigator records it in quotation marks and without attribution in Thomas Reed Powell’s New Republic piece of 7 February 1923, in S. E. Morison in The New England Quarterly in January 1928, and in Charles A. Beard in 1940. Marks around a phrase are how a writer signals it is not theirs.
  • The Parker credit enters in 1944, in Bennett Cerf’s Try and Stop Me: “She polished off one scientific volume with the dictum, ‘It was written without fear and without research.’” Quote Investigator ↗ notes that no book title and no review is given — and none has been produced since.
Public domain

The phrase was first published in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912, printed in 1914 — comfortably before the 1931 line at which United States copyright can still reach a published work. The volume is scanned and freely readable at the Internet Archive.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Often misattributed

Parker is the name the line travels under, and she is the last person in its documented history, not the first. The chain of credits is worth laying out because each link is dated.

Dorothy Parker Not Parker

The earliest link to Parker is Bennett Cerf’s anthology Try and Stop Me in 1944 — thirty-two years after Becker’s printed use — and it names no book, no magazine and no date, per Quote Investigator ↗. Robert E. Drennan’s The Algonquin Wits repeated the credit in 1968 and called it a book review.

Robert E. Drennan, The Algonquin Wits Circular

Drennan is the source for several Parker attributions that have since collapsed. Wikiquote ↗ lists “You can’t teach an old dogma new tricks” as attributed to Parker by Drennan and then found anonymously fifteen years earlier, and notes that for “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly” Drennan’s source “seems to be a Parker review which does not seem to contain this quote.”

Carl L. Becker, 1912 Documented

Becker aimed it at A. M. Simons’s Social Forces in American History in a paper printed in the Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912 ↗, p. 133. He used the phrase again in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers in 1932.

Andrew Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy Second target, not the origin

Becker did apply the phrase to Carnegie as well — Clifton Fadiman quoted him doing so in The New Yorker of 5 April 1941: “Dr. Becker refers neatly to that eminent library-lover’s naive volume, ‘Triumphant Democracy,’ as ‘written without fear and without research.’” That is a second Becker target, not a rival origin, and it is recorded by Quote Investigator ↗.

The phrase is Carl L. Becker’s, from 1912, and the page is scanned and readable. Parker’s name was attached to it in 1944 by an anthologist who cited nothing.

Context

Why it mattered

Becker was not being merely rude. His paper was an argument that American historians reviewed books badly — politely, vaguely, and without the nerve to say what a book was worth — and the Simons demolition was his demonstration of the alternative.

The joke has a hinge in it. “Without fear” is praise; “without research” turns the compliment inside out in three words. That structure is exactly why it detached from its author and floated free among reviewers for thirty years before anyone thought to ask whose it was.

“Without fear” is a compliment until the next three words arrive.

Read the full story

Read in full, Becker’s verdict on Simons is more generous than the fragment suggests. He goes on to call the book “written nevertheless with profound conviction, and significant because it is representative of what probably passes for history among militant socialists” — and predicts that in the next fifty years many better histories of the United States would be written from the same point of view. He was right about that.

Why the line drifted to Parker is no mystery. She was the period’s designated wit, and an unclaimed quip about a bad book had an obvious home. Wikiquote’s Parker page carries a standing warning about exactly this habit, asking readers to verify the provenance of anything ascribed to her.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Truth Doubt

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: Written Without Fear and Without Researchquoteinvestigator.com

The full citation trail from Becker in 1912 through Cerf in 1944 to Drennan in 1968.
Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912archive.org

The scanned 1914 volume containing Becker’s paper “The Reviewing of Historical Books”; the phrase is on page 133.
Carl Lotus Beckeren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the historian: life dates, his years at the University of Kansas, and The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers.
Wikiquote: Dorothy Parkeren.wikiquote.org

Carries a standing warning about attributions to Parker, and documents several credits that trace back to Drennan’s 1968 anthology and then collapse.
Dorothy Parkeren.wikipedia.org

Biography of the writer the line is usually pinned on.

The author

About Carl L. Becker

Carl L. Becker

1873–1945 · American historian; Professor of History at the University of Kansas 1902–1916, then at Cornell 1917–1941

Carl Lotus Becker was one of the most stylish American historians of his generation, and the phrase that escaped him is a fair sample of the prose. He taught at the University of Kansas for fourteen years before moving to Cornell, where he spent the rest of his career. His best-known book, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (1932), is still read — and it is where he used the same phrase a second time, about words “permitted to slip off the tongue or the pen without fear and without research.”

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Becker, Carl. “The Reviewing of Historical Books.” In Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1912, 127–40. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1914. The phrase appears on p. 133.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Written Without Fear and Without Research’?” Last verified 3 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/written-without-fear-and-without-research/

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