Daniel Boorstin, a Pulitzer Prize winner and social historian who was librarian of the Library of Congress U.S. for 12 years, died at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington DC in April 2004 at the age of 89.

Boorstin, who was also a lawyer and taught for 23 years at the University of Chicago, wrote more than twenty books, including two major trilogies. The first on the American experience and the other on world intellectual history viewed through prisms of scientific and geographical discoveries, the work of creative artists and the ideas of prophets and philosophers. As librarian of the Library of Congress between 1975 and 1987, Boorstin literally brought gusts of fresh air to a heavy and intimidating institution whose 241 kilometers of shelves and 19 reading rooms were terra incognita for apie people and even to many scholars. Hers was the order of the majestic bronze doors of the world's largest library kept open, installed at the entrance to picnic tables and benches. In it, he founded a center to encourage reading and organizing concerts and multimedia events for the general public. Recalling his order to keep the doors open, he once said: "They said it could produce drafts, and I said, 'Wow, that's just what we need."

Boorstin, a man of prodigious energy who wrote almost every day, almost all the time, encountered a small complication in his confirmation hearings before the Senate. Some senators demanded that she not writing while working as a librarian. Of course he refused to stop writing, but he undertook to do in the time it was his. And he did: he wrote at night, weekends and from four to nine PM on weekdays. Boorstin, a clever man, not given to formalities, politically conservative and supporter of bow ties and unconventional ideas, provided the United States four decades ago a glimpse of their future reality show and photo shoots. Introduced the notion of "seudoacontecimiento" to describe events like press conferences and television debates that are organized to get news coverage and shape public opinion. In his 1962 book, The Image: Or What Happened to the American Dream, Boorstin quoted the Kennedy-Nixon debates, which he said had reduced national issues to trivial drama samples.

Boorstin developed his social theories in a steady outpouring of books that were popular with many readers and critics, but not always were among the other historians. His first trilogy, The Americans with subtitles from the colonial experience (1958), The National Experience (1965) and The Democratic Experience (1973) won many awards. The first volume won the Bancroft Prize, the second won the Francis Parkman Prize and the last, that focused on the entrepreneurs and inventions of the century following the Civil War, received the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1973. He also won the National Book Award for his collaboration with prestigious American letters in 1989.

The second trilogy-an enormous edifice of words devoted to scholarship and intellectual history of the world, but addressed to the general reader-was composed of Discoverers (1983), which focused on geographic and scientific explorers, creators (1992) on artists and their contribution, and Searchers (1995), which examined the ideas and lives of religious leaders and philosophers. Although the scope of the book was very broad, historical approach was typically realistic: people's lives, their daily concerns, the utensils they used, how to solve everyday problems.