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Walt W. Rostow died on February 13th in Austin, Texas where he was still on 
the faculty at the age of 86.  To see some of the obituaries, you can look 
at the Uiversity of Texas site at: 
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Rostow/ 
 
 
Professor Rostow was interviewed for The Cliometrics Society Newsletter in 
1994.  
 
 
The editors' note of that interview stated: Walt W. Rostow is Rex G. Baker, 
Jr. Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Texas at 
Austin, but still teaches "The World Economy: 1750-1994 " in two terms. He 
was educated at Yale ('36; Ph.D., 1940) and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford 
(1936-38). During the 1940s he alternated academic with government service: 
teaching at Columbia in 1940-41, Oxford in 1946-47, and Cambridge in 
1949-50, and working with the Office of Strategic Services in Washington 
and London during the war years (1941-45) and at the United Nations 
Economic Commission for Europe in 1947- 49. In 1950 he joined the economics 
faculty at MIT for a decade, during which time he served also as consultant 
to the Federal Government. He re-entered full-time government service in 
1961 for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and returned to academic 
life at the University of Texas in 1969. 
 
 
Our interview took place in mid-March 1994 at Rostow's home in Austin, and 
was conducted by John V. C Nye (Washington University in St. Louis), who 
writes: W. W Rostow has been one of the most influential, imposing and 
controversial figures in the fields of economic history and development for 
over half a century. He is best known for his book, The Stages of Economic 
Growth (1960), in which he characterized the process of modern growth 
through a series of five stages. The book introduced the term 'take-off 
into sustained growth' to the jargon of economic development and had an 
enormous impact on the development policy literature. His first works on 
the growth and development of early industrial Britain, partly in 
collaboration with Gayer and Schwartz (1953), served as pioneering works of 
cliometrics before the term was even invented. Despite his early interest 
in quantification, Rostow remained outside the cliometrics movement of the 
late '50s and early '60s. He has often referred to himself as a maverick in 
the profession. His most recent work is a 700+-page history of modern 
economic thought, Theorists of Economic Growth from David Hume to the 
Present (1990). 
 
 
You can read the entire interview at http://www.eh.net/Rostow.htm. 
 
 
Samuel H. Williamson 
Executive Director, Eh.Net 
(513) 529-2851 
fax (513) 529-3308 
[log in to unmask] 
http://www.eh.net 
 
 
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