Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium

ESSAYISTS

165 Essayists R A L P H B E R G E N G R E N (1871–1947?) The poet Ralph Bergengren wrote many volumes of light verse and familiar essays for both adults and children. His books include Comforts of Home (1918) and The Perfect Gentleman (1919). E D WA R D E S T L I N C U M M I N G S (1894–1962) A leading member of the distinguished generation of American modernists that emerged after the First World War, Cummings was widely celebrated for writing lyrical love poems that played with language. Always tinkering with the conventions of print, he preferred to be known as e. e. cummings. In addition to many volumes of poetry, he wrote a perceptive expose of Stalinism in his travel diary Eimi (1933). Like his Harvard classmate and friend Gilbert Seldes, Cummings was an early admirer of Krazy Kat and wrote the introduction to the first book-form reprinting of George Herriman’s strip in 1946. Cumming’s poetic oeuvre was collected in a single volume in 1972. U M B E R T O E C O (1932– ) Born in Alessandria, Italy, Eco has had a dual career as a scholar and novelist. In non-fiction books such as A Theory of Semiotics (Italy 1975; United States 1976), Eco pioneered the academic discipline of semiotics, which sought to systemize the study of cultural signs. Many of Eco’s essays touch on popular fiction, so appropriately enough his 1980 novel The Name of the Rose was an international bestseller. A murder mystery set in a medieval monastery, Eco’s novel grew out of his scholarly interest in the intellectual history of the Middle Ages. M A N N Y F A R B E R (1917– ) As a film critic in the 1940s and 1950s, Manny Farber was among the first to celebrate the achievement of directors such as Howard Hawks and Chuck Jones, who managed to achieve a distinctive style even while doing commercial Hollywood genre films or animated short cartoons. Farber’s early writings appeared in The Nation and The New Republic and were later collected in Negative Spaces (1971; expanded edition 1998). Farber is also a well-regarded painter. L E S L I E F I E D L E R (1917–2003) Born in Newark, New Jersey, Leslie Fiedler was perhaps the most controversial of the mid-century intellectuals. His focus on the homoerotic subtext of nineteenth century American literature (pursued in a famous Partisan Review essay and the 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel) caused immense anxiety in the field of American studies. In his book What Was Literature? (1982), Fiedler called for the breaking down of the barrier between high art and popular culture. In addition to his energetic and contentious non-fiction books and articles, Fiedler also wrote short stories and novels. C L E M E N T G R E E N B E R G (1909–1994) Along with Harold Rosenberg, Clement Greenberg was the foremost art critic among the New York intellectuals. Greenberg forcefully championed abstract expressionism as the logical heir to modernism, thereby helping legitimize the work of artists such as Jackson Pollock. Greenberg’s emphasis on the formal properties of art, the way that good painting must make use of the qualities of paint, has been much challenged in recent years. However, few can deny that he fundamentally defined the language for discussing modern art. His collected essays were published in four volumes by the University of Chicago Press from 1986 to 1993. I R V I N G H O W E (1920–1993) The creative tension between art and politics lies at the heart of Irving Howe’s writing . For many years in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a revolutionary Marxist, belonging to a remarkable cohort of young Americans influenced by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition. Yet during those years he also felt the tug of literary criticism, especially as practiced by the formalist New Critics. An attempt to balance the claims of politics and culture can be seen in many of Howe’s books, notably Politics and the Novel (1957; with a new preface 1992) and in his Selected Writings (1990). Aside from helping launch Dissent magazine in 1953, Howe also found time to write a muchloved history of Jewish immigrant culture (World of Our Fathers, written with the assistance of Kenneth Libo in 1976...