John Leonard (American critic)

John Leonard (born February 25, 1939) is an American literary, TV, film and cultural critic.

Life and career

John Leonard grew up in Washington, D.C., Jackson Heights, Queens, and Long Beach, California, where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School. Raised by a single mother, Ruth Smith, he made his way to Harvard University, where he immersed himself in the school newspaper, "The Harvard Crimson", only to drop out in the spring of his sophomore year. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley. An acerbic leftist, Leonard had an unlikely early patron in conservative leader William F. Buckley, who gave him his first job in journalism at "National Review" magazine. There, he worked alongside such young talents as Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Renata Adler and Arlene Croce. Leonard went on to be Drama and Literature Director for Pacifica Radio flagship KPFA in Berkeley, where he featured a young Pauline Kael and served as the house book reviewer, delighting in the torrent of galleys sent him by publishers. He worked as an English teacher in Roxbury, Massachusetts, as a labor organizer of migrant farm workers, and as a community organizer for Vietnam Summer before joining "The New York Times Book Review" in 1967.

The paper promoted him to daily book reviewer in 1969 and made him the executive editor of the "Times Book Review" in 1971 at the age of 31. In 1975, he returned to the role of daily book reviewer, championing the work of women writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Mary Gordon. He was the first critic to review Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison and the first American critic to review Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. From 1977 to 1980, Leonard wrote “Private Lives,” a weekly column for the "Times" about his family, friends, and experiences.

Leonard has, over a 45-year career, written on culture, politics, television, books and the media in many other venues, including "The Nation", "The New Republic", "The New York Review of Books", "Harper's", "The Atlantic Monthly", "Esquire", "Playboy", "Penthouse", "Vanity Fair", "TV Guide", "Ms. Magazine", "Harper's Bazaar", "Vogue", "Newsweek", "New York Woman", "Memories", "Tikkun", "The Yale Review", "The Village Voice", "New Statesman", "The Boston Globe", "Washington Post Book World", "The Los Angeles Times Book Review", "American Heritage" and Salon.com. He reviewed books for National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" and wrote a column for "New York Newsday" called “Culture Shock.” He hosted WGBH's "First Edition", and reviewed books, TV and movies on "CBS Sunday Morning" for 16 years. Leonard taught creative writing and criticism at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. He has told the story of Japanese author Kōbō Abe in every one of these venues.

Leonard has written extensively about television in his career – for "Life" under the pen name Cyclops, for "New York Magazine" from 1984 to the present, and in his 1997 book "Smoke and Mirrors". In addition, he is the author of four novels and five collections of essays.

Leonard was co-literary editor of "The Nation" with his wife, Sue Leonard, from 1995 to 1998, and continues as a contributing editor for the magazine. He currently writes a monthly column on new books for "Harper's" magazine and is a frequent contributor to the "New York Times Book Review" and "The New York Review of Books". Leonard rated highest among literary critics in a 2006 "Time Out New York" survey of writers and publishers. [http://www.timeout.com/newyork/Details.do?page=1&xyurl=xyl://TONYWebArticles1/584/features/books.xml] He received the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006 [http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-sandrof-winner-john-leonard.html#links] and is at work on a new collection of essays and his memoirs, which will be published by Viking Penguin.

Leonard lives in New York City with his wife Sue. He has two children from his first marriage – Salon.com columnist Andrew Leonard and Georgetown University history professor Amy Leonard – and a stepdaughter, Jen Nessel, who heads the communications department at the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as three grandchildren: Tiana and Eli Miller-Leonard and Oscar Ray Arnold-Nessel.

Effect on the literary world

"He writes a poetry that makes him the top literary critic of our time.""--Studs Terkel

The "Columbia Journalism Review" has called Leonard “our primary progressive, catholic literary critic.” [http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/1/O'Rourke.asp] Stylistically, he is, as "CJR" dubbed him, an "enthusiast,” known for his wit and wordplay, his liberal use of the semicolon and his impassioned examinations of authors and their works. He has written definitive career essays on the work of writers ranging from Thomas Pynchon and Joan Didion to Eduardo Galeano, Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Mary Gordon, John Cheever, Toni Morrison and Richard Powers.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote of him: “When I read anything by my longtime friend John Leonard, his voice is that of a total stranger. He is too polite in ordinary conversations, with me at least, to set off the fireworks of all he knows and feels after reading and comparing and responding to, in the course of his long career as a literary critic, a thousand times more books than I have even heard of. Only in print does he light the night sky of my ignorance and intellectual lassitude with sizzles and bangs, and gorgeous blooms of fire. He is a TEACHER! When I start to read John Leonard, it is as though I, while simply looking for the men’s room, blundered into a lecture by the smartest man who ever lived.”

Studs Terkel has called him "a critic from whom I learned about my own books." Terkel told the NBCC's Elizabeth Taylor: "He speaks truth to power with a style that is all his own -- Leonardian. 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." [http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/02/studs-terkel-on-john-leonard.html#links]

elected works

Books:

"Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures" (2002)
"When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm Suckers, Satanic Therapists and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post-Toasties New World Hip-Hop" (1999)
"Smoke and Mirrors: Violence, Television, and Other American Cultures" (1997)
"The Last Innocent White Man in America" (1994)
"Private Lives in the Imperial City" (1979)
"This Pen for Hire" (1973)
"Black Conceit" (1973)
"Crybaby of the Western World" (1969)
"Wyke Regis" (1966)
"The Naked Martini" (1964)

Essays and introductions by Leonard feature in:

"We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: The Collected Nonfiction of Joan Didion" (2006)
"The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge: A Desk Reference for the Curious Mind" (2004)
"These United States" (introduction and editor, 2003)
"Follow the Bouncing Ball: How the Caged Bird Learns to Sing", "The Business of Journalism", by William Serrin (2000)
"Educating Television", "Imagining Education: The Media and Schools in America", by Gene I. Maeroff (1988)
"A Really Big Show: A Visual History of The Ed Sullivan Show" (1992)
"Ten (or Twenty) of the Best Books of the Millennium", "The Millennium Book" by Gail Collins and Dan Collins (1991)
"SoHo: A Picture Portrait" (1985)
"Man’s Fate" by Andre Malraux (1984)
"Dodgerisimus", "The Ultimate Baseball Book", by Daniel Okrent and Harris Lewine (1979)
"Friends and Friends of Friends", by Bernard Pierre Wolff (1978)
"Why I'll Never Finish My Mystery", "Murder, Ink" (1977)

External links

* [http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/leonard.html Interview on "Now With Bill Moyers" (2003)]
* [http://www.thenation.com/directory/bios/_nonejohn_leonard Leonard in "The Nation"]
* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/38 Leonard in "The New York Review of Books"]
* [http://nymag.com/nymag/author_99/ Leonard in "New York Magazine"]
* [http://www.harpers.org/subjects/JohnLeonard/WriterOf/Review Leonard in "Harper's"]