In a climate that Mr. Snyder helped create, he billed himself as a businessman rather than as a man of letters.

Indeed, to those who have known only the courtly, controlled man of letters with the encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, the account may come as a shock.

Lives Lived: Paul Johnson, a prolific journalist, biographer and historian prized by conservatives, fashioned himself a man of letters in the great British tradition.

“He really is that European idea of a man of letters,” said one of his former students, the poet Mary Jo Bang, in a 2017 interview with the Paris Review.

Epstein could be described as a man of letters with a feel for commerce or as a man of business with a taste for fine literature, and both would be correct.