http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/105843/the-last-critic-turns-100
A link sent me by Mel Livatino tonight.
Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Herschel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.
Of that pioneering generation, there is only one major figure still living: M.H. Abrams, who will celebrate his 100th birthday on July 23. (Abrams is also still publishing: In August, Norton will bring out a new collection of his essays, The Fourth Dimension of a Poem.) Abrams’ name will be familiar to just about every English major of the last half-century, if only because it appears at the top of the spine of each edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, which Abrams created in 1962.
They misspelled my name and misreported my death, but it is a lovely article on Mike Abrams. I love Mike and wish him a long life in his new century!
P.S. Thank you, Mike, for your critique of my period headnote to THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE in 1978!
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