A Genial Explorer of Literary Worlds
My literary education was feverish and haphazard. From later childhood through the end of adolescence, from Jimmy Carter to the first George Bush, I schooled myself by snatching novels from my parents’ shelves, haunting the stacks at the local public library, and clawing through boxes of dry-rotted 
Penguins and Bantams at yard sales. Those books formed a life raft, a tool kit, a compendium of clues about what the world might look like and how a person might live in it. Like many other restless, bookish young souls, I read ravenously and indiscriminately, until over time patterns started to emerge, half-occult links between one volume and the next.
The name John Leonard was one of these links. The works of fiction that seemed to contain the most galvanizing news of the world — the ones that disclosed entire undreamed-of universes within their pages — all seemed to bear this man’s endorsement on their front or back covers. Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley, V. S. Naipaul: writers like these were drawing a new global map of literary possibility, and John Leonard, more than any other critic, was assisting in the cartography, pointing readers toward freshly liberated zones of imagination. He spoke in the voice not of disembodied authority, but of enthusiasm.
I tracked his byline to the pages of this newspaper, and then to the first few issues of the reborn Vanity Fair, which at the time (the early 1980s) was devoting more of its pages to the likes of Mr. García Márquez and Mr. Naipaul than to the collected young blondes of Hollywood. It might have been on the fourth or fifth rereading of one of Mr. Leonard’s essays in that magazine — I think it was his long, sharp and generous consideration of William F. Buckley, who two decades before had published some of Mr. Leonard’s earliest writing in National Review — that a long-held intimation blossomed into conscious thought. Wow, I said to myself, I wish I could write like that.