John Leonard | Cultural critic, 69

Literary and cultural critic John Leonard, 69, an early champion of Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and many other authors, and so consumed and informed by books that Kurt Vonnegut once praised him as "the smartest man who ever lived," died Wednesday in New York of complications from lung cancer.

A former union activist and community organizer, Mr. Leonard was an emphatic liberal whose career began in the 1960s at the conservative National Review and continued at countless other publications, including the New York Times, the New Republic, the Nation and the Atlantic Monthly (find tributes and links to his reviews at http://go.philly.com/leonard). He was also a TV critic for New York magazine, a columnist for Newsday, and a commentator for CBS Sunday Morning.

Mr. Leonard had the critic's most fortunate knack of being ahead of his time. He was the first major reviewer to assess Morrison's fiction and the first major American critic to write about Marquez. As the literary director for radio station KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., Mr. Leonard featured the commentary of Pauline Kael before she became famous as a film critic for the New Yorker. Mr. Leonard was also an early advocate of Mary Gordon, Maxine Hong Kingston and other writers.

Mr. Leonard's own books included Black Conceit, This Pen for Hire, and Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures.

- AP