John Leonard, 1939 - 2008

John Leonard, one of our greatest literary critics — not to mention one of our greatest film critics, and one of our greatest television critics — died last night after a long battle with lung cancer. He was 69. As noted in the first report, from New York Magazine’s Vulture blog, “He was a fiercely intelligent, passionate writer with a truly original voice, and an omni-cultural critic of a kind that we don’t see much anymore.” From his beginnings as a union activist and community organizer and working as a host on Pacifica radio, Leonard eventually became a surprisingly prolific critic whose lyrical prose and perceptive eye never seemed to flag. At the time of his death, he wrote a regular column of TV criticism for New York Magazine, a monthly books column for Harper’s Magazine, and contributed regularly to the New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and numerous other publications. He was the longtime editor of the books section at The Nation (along with his wife, Sue). Prior to that, he was also the editor of the New York Times Book Review (an experience he wrote about — scathingly — in an essay that you can watch him discuss with Bill Moyers here). Studs Terkel once said of Leonard’s criticism, “He is a throwback to a great tradition. He has been a literary critic in the noblest sense of the word, where you didn’t determine whether a book was ‘good or bad’ but wrote with a point of view of how you should read the book.” Leonard was also the author of several novels early in his career but soon came to feel, as he once told this reporter, that “I wasn’t really a novelist.” Subsequently, he published several books of criticism, including his last book, Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures, from the New Press. But, as Meaghan O’Rourke noted in a profile of Leonard for the Columbia Journalism Review that ran last year, “it is in his literary criticism that the outlines of a powerful life of the mind truly take shape.” As Leonard told her, “I love pop culture. I reviewed TV for decades and got a kick out of it, but nobody is going to tell me that there are deeper abiding complexities and discomfitures than those I find in great literature.” Ultimately, as Mark Lotto suggests in an insightful — and moving — appreciation for the New York Observer, the best way to talk about Leonard’s writing is to simply put it in front of ourselves. Lotto offers up the following passage, noting, “He wrote it about Elizabeth Hardwick, but it applies equally to him”:

“So superior are these sentences to the churlishness that passes for criticism elsewhere in our culture — the exorcism, the vampire bite, the vanity production, the body-snatching and the sperm-sucking by pomo aliens —so generous and wise, that they seem to belong to an entirely different realm of discourse, where the liberal arts meet something like transubstantiation. There will be no dagger at the end of this paragraph. She sends up kites; she catches lightning.”