Brendan Gill

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Brendan Gill (October 4, 1914 – December 27, 1997) wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gill was graduated in 1936 from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull & Bones.

A champion of architectural preservation and other visual arts, he chaired the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and authored 15 books, including Here at The New Yorker and the iconoclastic Frank Lloyd Wright biography Many Masks.

In September 1989, Gill wrote the controversial article "The faces of Joseph Campbell" for the New York Review of Books where he made a number of accusations against Campbell, including charging him with anti-Semitism. Gill, who identified himself as a friend of Campbell from the Century Club in New York City, noted in the article that he wrote it in reaction to the enormous popularity of The Power of Myth series in 1988. The New York Review of Books published in November 1989 under the headline, "Joseph Campbell: An Exchange" a series of letters defending Campbell and written by some of his former students and colleagues. Gill responded to these letters by upholding his claims.

In the April/May 2006 issue of Bookforum, the author of the article ([1]) "Estate of Mind about Dorothy Parker's Legacy" wrote:

The most questionable consideration of Parker's life and work came from Viking, her publisher since 1930. Six years after her death, the firm decided to revise her collected works, The Portable Dorothy Parker, in print since 1944, by expanding the contents (with Hellman's approval) and adding a new preface to accompany W. Somerset Maugham's original introduction. To write this new piece the publisher first invited Hellman, who declined. Brendan Gill, a New Yorker writer who'd been slightly acquainted with Parker, accepted the job. While Gill commended Parker's "perfect manners," he had a low opinion of her literary achievements: "The span of her work is narrow and what it embraces is often slight." Unlike Maugham, who praised her "enduring significance," Gill contended that she was an overrated writer who enjoyed an early vogue but whose moment had passed some forty years earlier. The rest was only "a protracted life-in-death." He administered another sideswipe in his comparison of her to a guest who has outstayed his welcome and "yet makes no attempt to pack his things and go." As a result, some people who assumed Parker had exited the scene long ago saw her true departure as a bit tardy, said Gill, adding that she "would have been the first to agree."

Brendan Gill died of natural causes in 1997, at the age of 83 .

[edit] References

Brendan Gill, "The faces of Joseph Campbell" from The New York Review of Books, Vol. 36, Issue 14, September 28, 1989, pages 16-19.
"Brendan Gill vs. Defenders of Joseph Campbell-Joseph Campbell: An Exchange." from New York Review of Books, Vol. 36, Issue 17, November 9, 1989, pages 57-61.