Robert Warshow (1917–1955) was an American author, a film critic and essayist, who wrote about film and popular culture for Commentary magazine and The Partisan Review in the mid-20th century. He was born and resided in New York City and attended the University of Michigan.
Among the articles published in Warshow's short lifetime were "The Westerner" and "The Gangster as Tragic Hero", analyses of the Western movie and the gangster movie genre from a cultural standpoint. He also penned essays praising playwright Clifford Odets as well as George Herriman's newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat. "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg" showed the executed American Stalinists in a brutally honest light. In an critique of The Crucible Warshow argued that Arthur Miller was not as competent a dramatist as was perceived. After Fredric Wertham and Gershon Legman, Warshow was the first serious critic to write about the "video nasties" of his day, EC Comics and its Mad magazine.
Warshow died of a heart attack at the age of 37. Most of his published work was collected in the book The Immediate Experience in 1962, expanded in 2001.
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“Modern equalitarian societies ... whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier.... Happiness thus becomes the chief political issue—in a sense, the only political issue—and for that reason it can never be treated as an issue at all.”
—Robert Warshow (1917–1955)