{"id":1063,"date":"2008-11-08T09:57:38","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T16:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2008\/11\/john-leonard\/"},"modified":"2008-11-08T09:58:31","modified_gmt":"2008-11-08T16:58:31","slug":"john-leonard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/11\/08\/john-leonard\/","title":{"rendered":"John Leonard Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A Genial Explorer of Literary Worlds<\/h1>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/p>\n

By\u00a0A. O. SCOTT<\/a><\/p>\n

My literary education was feverish and haphazard. From later childhood through the end of adolescence, from\u00a0Jimmy Carter<\/a>\u00a0to the first George Bush, I schooled myself by snatching novels from my parents\u2019 shelves, haunting the stacks at the local public library, and clawing through boxes of dry-rotted \"leonard.png\"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.<\/p>\n

The name John Leonard was one of these links. The works of fiction that seemed to contain the most galvanizing news of the world \u2014 the ones that disclosed entire undreamed-of universes within their pages \u2014 all seemed to bear this man\u2019s endorsement on their front or back covers.\u00a0Toni Morrison<\/a>,\u00a0Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez<\/a>,\u00a0Don DeLillo<\/a>,\u00a0Grace Paley<\/a>,\u00a0V. S. Naipaul<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n

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. Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez 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\u2019s essays in that magazine \u2014 I think it was his long, sharp and generous consideration of\u00a0William F. Buckley<\/a>, who two decades before had published some of Mr. Leonard\u2019s earliest writing in National Review \u2014 that a long-held intimation blossomed into conscious thought. Wow, I said to myself, I wish I could write like\u00a0that.<\/span><\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times A Genial Explorer of Literary Worlds By\u00a0A. O. SCOTT My literary education was feverish and haphazard. From later childhood through the end of adolescence, from\u00a0Jimmy Carter\u00a0to the first George Bush, I schooled myself by snatching novels from my parents\u2019 shelves, haunting the stacks at the local public library, and clawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}