Curated playlist
American literary critics
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died in 1937 virtually unknown to readers. His monsters later became global touchstones.
- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in an underground meat locker.
- Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
- W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
- Ursula K. Le GuinUrsula K. Le Guin was eleven years old when she mailed her first short story to Astounding Science Fiction. The magazine sent it back. She then submitted nothing else for ten years. Nearly sixty years of publishing lay ahead of her after…
- Ralph EllisonA 1967 fire destroyed more than 300 pages of Ralph Ellison's second novel. He never finished it.
- Vladimir NabokovNovelist Vladimir Nabokov also named butterfly species, and later genetic research backed his theory.
- Edmund WilsonCritic Edmund Wilson mailed strangers a postcard listing over two dozen things he would not do.
- Stephen GreenblattStephen Greenblatt was stunned when universities sought experts in "New Historicism," a phrase he coined.
- Harold BloomHarold Bloom argued that every poet struggles to escape the shadow of earlier poets.
- Lewis MumfordLewis Mumford argued the clock, not the steam engine, drove the Industrial Revolution. He never finished college.
- George SteinerGeorge Steiner was born Francis George Steiner on the 23rd of April 1929. He was a literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist and educator, and he is described as both French and American. Harriet Harvey-Wood, a former literature…