Volume 1, Number 9 · December 26, 1963
Huneker
By Morton Dauwen Zabel
James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts
by Arnold T. Schwab
Stanford, 384 pp., $8.25
Huneker has had to wait forty-two years, almost half a century, for his first biography—an odd fate for a writer who was one of the best-known of his time and in the opinion of some one of its 'greatest.' Now that the book has arrived it turns out to be excellent one—not that rarity among biographies, a work of art, and not a masterpiece of psychological or intellectual portraiture, but at this point something equally valuable: an exhaustive record of the man and his era and a teeming account of the age whose arts he chronicled, assessed, and promoted in one of the largest bodies of critical writing any American has ever produced. The barest outlines of his career define Huneker's case Born in Philadelphia in 1857, he arrived in New York in 1886; by 1891 turned from music and piano teaching to journalism; wrote criticism of all kinds—musical, operatic, art, dramatic, literary, along with an outpouring of essays, travel reports, and fiction—in an unbroken spate for the next thirty years; died struggling to finish his last Sunday article in 1921; and within a decade, as Mr. Schwab says, 'seemed to be a legend and a symbol rather than an operative force in criticism.' It is a familiar destiny among critical journalists, but in Huneker's case it calls for some conscientious examination and justice.
Review, 2860 words
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