John Leonard papers, 1939-2015, bulk 1950s-2008

John Leonard (1939-2008) was a renowned cultural and literary critic, best known for his work as the editor of The New York Times Book Review. He attended Harvard University from 1956-58, where he gained his first editorial experience working on the Harvard Crimson before dropping out of Harvard to attend University of California, Berkeley. During the 1960s, he worked as a union and community organizer and as one of a handful of leftist journalists at the conservative magazine, National Review.

Leonard joined The New York Times in 1967, working first as an editor for the Book Review, then as a book critic, and in 1971, as the editor in chief of The New York Times Book Review, a position he served in until 1975. He continued contributing to the Book Review until his death, going on to also write extensively for Harper's Monthly,The New York Review of Books,The Nation, and New York Newsday. Under his leadership, the NYTBR became what Slate magazine would later describe as "the voice of the antiwar movement." Leonard used the platform of the book review as a wider lens to comment upon the cultural turmoil of the 1970s, publishing an early and controversial review of books on the Vietnam War to comment on war crimes.

An "omnivorous" cultural commentator, Leonard wrote on an extensive array of topics, ranging well beyond literary fiction into television, film, politics, and culture. In addition to also reviewing books for The New York Review of Books,The Atlantic Monthly,The Village Voice,The Los Angeles Time Book Review, and The Washington Post Book World, Leonard was also the television critic for Life Magazine and New York Magazine, a columnist for Newsday, a book reviewer for National Public Radio's Fresh Air, and a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning. He wrote four novels and six essay collections and co-edited The Nation with his wife Sue Leonard from 1995 to 1998. Leonard's essays and reviews mix cultural commentary and literary criticism, intermingling reviews on contemporary fiction with commentary that ranged in scope from U.S. race relations to the Persian Gulf War. In the words of Joan Didion, a friend and colleague from his early years with National Review, Leonard "was quite simply our most thrilling observer."

One way Leonard's work helped expand and redefine American cultural criticism and the role of the public intellectual was in bringing a critical eye to new objects and genres. As a television as well as literary critic, his reviews brought serious attention to the role of the television program as a genre in American culture. He was the first reviewer to recognize the work of authors such as Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Mary Gordon, the latter of which described him in her retrospective as having done "a great deal to create a new breed of critic," one who took women writers seriously within the largely male-dominated literary field of the 1970s. Kurt Vonnegut, a close friend, described reading Leonard's writing as akin to listening to a lecture by "the smartest man who ever lived." By his own reckoning Leonard had read and reviewed over 13,000 books over the course of his life. In 2007, the National Book Critics Circle honored Leonard with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

John Leonard died of lung cancer on November 5, 2008.