Richard Poirier | Critic, writer, 83

Richard Poirier, 83, a literary critic and writer who was one of the founders of the Library of America, a monumental effort to keep American literary classics in print, died Aug. 15 at Roosevelt Hospital in New York.

He suffered injuries in a fall at his home, said a friend, poet Frederick Seidel.

Dr. Poirier taught English for many years at Rutgers University, where in 1981 he founded Raritan: A Quarterly Review, a journal of literary criticism and cultural commentary. Among those published in Raritan are poets John Ashbery and Richard Howard, the Palestinian American writer Edward Said, critic Harold Bloom, and feminist writer Camille Paglia.

Dr. Poirier wrote books, essays, articles, and reviews about America's most perceptive writers and thinkers, but he also explored such cultural phenomena as the American invasion of the Beatles.

He was a major force behind the Library of America, the ambitious effort to publish the works of the greatest writers America has produced. With grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the nonprofit venture began publishing in May 1982, with works by Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Walt Whitman.

Nearly 200 volumes collecting the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, and many other writers have been published to date. - Washington Post