Krutch, Joseph Wood

Krutch, Joseph Wood

(kro͝och), 1893–1970, American author, editor, and teacher, b. Knoxville, Tenn., grad. Univ. of Tennessee, 1915, Ph.D. Columbia, 1923. He was on the editorial staff of the Nation (1924–52), and held a professorship at Columbia (1937–53). Highly regarded as a social and literary critic, Krutch's writings include Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), The Modern Temper (1929), Samuel Johnson (1944), and Henry David Thoreau (1948). After he moved to Arizona, he turned to the study of nature; his books in this field include The Twelve Seasons (1949) and The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation (1955).

Bibliography

See his autobiography, More Lives than One (1962); A Krutch Omnibus: Forty Years of Social and Literary Criticism (1970); The Best Nature Writings of Joseph Wood Krutch (1970).

Krutch, Joseph Wood

(1893–1970) author, critic, naturalist; born in Knoxville, Tenn. He graduated from the University of Tennessee and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1923. He taught at Columbia (1937–52) and published critical studies of Samuel Johnson, Edgar A. Poe, and Henry David Thoreau. His Measure of Man won a National Book Award in 1954. He was drama critic for The Nation from 1924–52. He moved to Tucson, Ariz., for his health in 1952, fell under the spell of the natural environment, and published a number of lyrical works about the life of the desert. Toward the end of his life he wrote and narrated television specials about the Sonora desert, the Grand Canyon, and Baja California.