Joseph Wood Krutch

Background

Joseph Wood Krutch was born on November 25, 1893 in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. He was the son of Edward Waldemore Krutch, an employee of a wholesale drug firm, and Adelaide Wood.

Education

Neither parent was notably committed to the arts, and the education young Krutch enjoyed in the Knoxville public schools was unexceptional. As an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, which he entered in 1911, Krutch prepared for a career teaching high school mathematics. But several literature courses and his editorship of the university's student magazine persuaded him to pursue graduate study in English at Columbia University, where he enrolled following his graduation from Tennessee in 1915.

He earned his master's degree in 1916 with a thesis on nineteenth-century American drama. In the spring of 1918 he interrupted his doctoral studies to enlist in the Army Psychological Corps. Following the armistice, he returned to Columbia to write a dissertation on English Restoration comedy. He received a fellowship that enabled him to spend the 1919-1920 academic year in Europe along with a fellow graduate student, Mark Van Doren, who had become and would remain his closest friend. In 1924 Krutch's dissertation was published and he was awarded Doctor of Philosophy.

Career

Krutch reveled in the cultural opportunities of New York City, and imagined himself an urban sophisticate. His love of the theater, first stimulated by performances of touring companies in Knoxville, was reinforced.

Following his return from Europe, Krutch taught English at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and contributed book reviews and essays to some of the leading periodicals of the day.

Unhappy in the classroom, Krutch resigned his position at Brooklyn Polytechnic in 1924 and became associate editor of the Nation, where his responsibilities included drama criticism. During the next quarter-century, he attended some 2, 000 Broadway plays and wrote more than 500 reviews. He also contributed book reviews, essays, and unsigned editorials. He was proud to associate himself with the Nation's outspoken liberalism, and in Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of Genius (1926) he embraced another of the fashionable literary and intellectual movements of the day by viewing Poe's career in terms of Freudian psychopathology. Heartened by the critical success of his book on Poe, Krutch wrote a series of long essays, collected as The Modern Temper (1929). Examining the origins and consequences of contemporary attitudes and beliefs, the book portrayed man's sense of emotional impoverishment in a world dominated by the debilitating, corrosive reason of science. The Modern Temper remains an eloquent synopsis of the modernist thought of the day. Krutch's uneasiness with the radical political thought of the 1930's was reflected in Was Europe a Success? (1934), a forceful liberal critique of the attraction Marxism held for many American intellectuals. Increasingly alienated from the literary and political enthusiasms of his contemporaries, Krutch also distanced himself physically from the urban life he had earlier relished.

Since the mid-1920's, he and his wife had summered in rural Connecticut. In 1932 they purchased a home in Redding, Connecticut, which soon became their primary residence. In Redding, Krutch became an avid student of nature and discovered there a source of spiritual solace from the despair of modernism. Krutch resigned his editorial position at the Nation in 1937, but retained his post as drama critic. That year he became professor of English at Columbia, where his courses on drama were highly popular. Two critical biographies, Samuel Johnson (1944) and Henry David Thoreau (1948), renewed Krutch's standing as a critic while paying tribute to two quite different writers whose outlooks Krutch was embracing as his own. His writing during the 1950's and 1960's evidenced his debt both to Johnson's commonsense philosophy and respect for the intelligent layperson and to Thoreau's demonstration that science could enhance man's appreciation of the human significance of nature. The publication of Thoreau was soon followed by the first of Krutch's essays about the natural universe in and around his Redding home. The Twelve Seasons (1949) marked the beginning of his successful career as a nature writer. Drawing upon his own daily observation, these essays combined scientific explanation of both common and unfamiliar natural phenomena with reflection upon their human significance.

During a 1950-1951 sabbatical in Tucson, Arizona, Krutch found material for a second such collection, The Desert Year (1952), and decided to make his home in Arizona. In 1952 Krutch resigned his professorship, relinquished his post as drama critic, and moved to Tucson. Free of academic and other responsibilities, and now dependent wholly upon his earnings as a writer, his literary output was prodigious in quantity though uneven in quality. In addition to several collections of essays on the flora and fauna of the Southwest, he published books on the Grand Canyon and Baja California. That plants and animals could survive--even joyously--amid the heat and aridity of the desert implied for Krutch man's capacity to endure and find meaning in a modern world bereft of traditional beliefs.

His rejection of positivism and mechanistic determinism and his assertion of the reality of consciousness and value announced his new sense of man's potentialities. In numerous essays of social and literary criticism, he offered a humanist's indictment of the materialism, moral relativism, and artistic nihilism he found in contemporary society. First published in journals such as the Saturday Review and the American Scholar, many of those essays were collected in Human Nature and the Human Condition (1959), If You Don't Mind My Saying So (1964), and And Even If You Do (1967). Krutch, having abandoned his earlier ambition to be counted among the modernist thinkers of his day, enjoyed the admiration of a large readership along with considerable financial success.

Achievements

• Krutch's book In The Measure of Man received the 1954 National Book Award for nonfiction. In 1967 he received the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for "distinguished achievement in the broad field of literature. "

Works

More photos

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  • The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Inte...)

  • The Desert Year (Sightline Books)

    ( Now back in print, Joseph Wood Krutch’s Burroughs Award...)

  • The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch

    (Binding tight, very minor shelf and reading wear, has wat...)

  • The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California

    ( "The author deftly weaves the materials of natural and ...)

  • Modern Temper: A Study And A Confession

    ( Krutch's incisive examination of the dilemmas faced by ...)

  • The Twelve Seasons

    (Essays on the contemplative nature of man's relationship ...)

  • More Lives Than One.

    (FIRST HARDCOVER EDITION)

  • Measure of Man: On Freedom, Human Values, Survival and the Modern Temper

Connections

On February 10, 1923 Krutch married Marcelle Leguia, who had come to America from her native France shortly before the outbreak of World War I and had been trained in America as a public health nurse. She was an admiring helpmate who patiently accommodated his valetudinarian demands.

Father:

Edward Waldemore Krutch

Mother:

Adelaide Wood

Spouse:

Marcelle Leguia

Friend:

Mark Van Doren