John Leonard (critic) - Effect On The Literary World

Effect On The Literary World

The Columbia Journalism Review called Leonard "our primary progressive, catholic literary critic." Stylistically, he was, 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 wrote 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 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."