Cultural critic John Leonard died Wednesday night at the age of sixty-nine. The following profile, by Meghan O’Rourke, was published in CJR’s January/February 2007 issue.

John Leonard was a literary prodigy who became editor of The New York Times Book Review at the tender age of thirty-two; today he is sixty-seven, and during a recent interview with Bill Moyers, sounded very much like a “lion in winter.” He has been writing cultural criticism in mainstream newspapers and magazines — among them The New York Times, New York, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation — since 1960. Yet for those readers who have encountered his writing piecemeal over the years — an essay here, a review there — it may be hard to trace the contours of his critical persona. Unlike James Wood, the chief literary critic of The New Republic, he doesn’t have a grand theory of fiction; unlike Michael Dirda, a senior editor at The Washington Post Book World, he is not a man of belles lettres; unlike the novelist and essayist Dale Peck, he is not a pugilist. He is neither a Freudian, nor a Marxist, nor a proponent of one aesthetic camp or another. Rather, his is the role of the discerning enthusiast, the Saturday reviewer who has read far more than most people and who writes about his discoveries with greater attention, insight, and felicity of self-expression than most of us can muster on any day of the week.

It would be fine to leave it at that, if it weren’t that the word “enthusiast” sounds dilettantish, somehow not quite serious. So let us try this: John Leonard is our primary progressive, catholic literary critic; he is also, with the exception of Susan Sontag, the best American literary critic to come...

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