What stories does HearLore have on American literary critics?

HearLore has narrated stories on American literary critics, each linked to related entries. Start with any one and follow the connections to your next listen.

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Curated playlist

American literary critics

Edgar Allan Poe14 minEdgar Allan Poe was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore on the 3rd of October, 1849, wearing clothes that were not his own. He could not explain himself. Four days later, at five in the morning on a Sunday, he was dead. He was…
T. S. Eliot16 minT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table". Critics called the image shocking and offensive. Georgian…
H. P. Lovecraft14 minH. P. Lovecraft died on the 15th of March 1937 in Providence, Rhode Island, virtually unknown to the reading public. He was 46 years old, hospitalized with terminal cancer of the small intestine, and had spent his final weeks keeping a…
Kurt Vonnegut13 minKurt Vonnegut survived the firebombing of Dresden by hiding in a meat locker three stories underground, surrounded by hanging cadavers. "It was cool there," he said. "When we came up the city was gone... They burnt the whole damn town…
Ezra Pound14 minEzra Weston Loomis Pound was born on the 30th of October 1885 in a two-story clapboard house in Hailey in the Idaho Territory. He would go on to become one of the defining voices in modernist literature, a tireless champion of writers like…
W. H. Auden13 minW. H. Auden died on the 29th of September 1973 in a Vienna hotel room, a few hours after reading his poems aloud at the Palais Pálffy. He had planned to return to Oxford the following morning. Instead, he was buried five days later in the…
Ralph Ellison10 minRalph Waldo Ellison was born on the 1st of March 1913 in Oklahoma City, named after the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by a father who hoped his son would grow up to be one. That father, Lewis Alfred Ellison, died in 1916 from a work-related…
Vladimir Nabokov12 minVladimir Nabokov arrived in the United States in May 1940 aboard the SS Champlain, a Russian exile who spoke three languages and had already written nine novels that almost nobody in America had read. He was forty years old, nearly broke,…
Edmund Wilson9 minEdmund Wilson Jr. sent a postcard. Not to a friend, not to an editor, but to strangers who wrote asking for his time. The card listed, in exhaustive detail, every request he would not honor: reading manuscripts, delivering lectures,…
Stephen Greenblatt9 minStephen Greenblatt once recalled the moment he realized the term "New Historicism" had taken on a life of its own. When he heard that American universities were advertising academic positions specifically requesting experts in the field,…
Harold Bloom12 minHarold Bloom was, by the time he died in 2019, probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world. He grew up at 1410 Grand Concourse in the Bronx, a boy in an Orthodox Jewish household where Yiddish was spoken and…
Lewis Mumford15 minLewis Mumford was born on the 19th of October 1895 in Flushing, Queens, and spent the next nine decades becoming one of the most wide-ranging thinkers America ever produced. He never finished a college degree. Tuberculosis interrupted his…
George Steiner8 minFrancis George Steiner was born on the 23rd of April 1929 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. His right arm withered from birth yet his mother insisted he use it as an able-bodied person would. She believed self-pity was nauseating and…