Film critic Stanley Kauffmann
NEW YORK - Stanley Kauffmann, 97, the critic, author, and editor who reviewed movies for the New Republic for more than 50 years, wrote his own plays and fiction, and helped discover the classic novels Fahrenheit 451 and The Moviegoer, died Wednesday of pneumonia in Manhattan.
NEW YORK - Stanley Kauffmann, 97, the critic, author, and editor who reviewed movies for the New Republic for more than 50 years, wrote his own plays and fiction, and helped discover the classic novels
Fahrenheit 451
and
The Moviegoer
, died Wednesday of pneumonia in Manhattan.
Mr. Kauffmann, the New York-born son of a dentist, started at the New Republic in 1958 and remained there - except for a brief interlude - for the rest of his life, becoming one of the oldest working critics in history. He wrote during a dynamic era and was among the last survivors of a generation that included Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris.
"I think it is the end of an era," David Thomson, a fellow critic at the New Republic, wrote.
As a publishing editor, he twice helped make history. In 1953, at Ballantine Books, he took on a disturbing novel about a future society in which books are burned - Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
Later, at Alfred A. Knopf, an agent sent him a manuscript by a young author named Walker Percy. Acquired for $1,000, The Moviegoer went on to win the National Book Award, beating Catch-22 among others.