Background
Louis Kronenberger was born on December 9, 1904 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Louis Kronenberger, a merchant, and Mabel Newwitter.
(Dust jacket tattered and price clipped. Boards edge worn....)
Dust jacket tattered and price clipped. Boards edge worn. Black marker damage to ffep. Endpapers stained at hinges. Stated first edition.
https://www.amazon.com/Cutting-Edge-Louis-Kronenberger/dp/B000BUKVSK?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000BUKVSK
(Lives and achievements of 14 great men, such as - Emerson...)
Lives and achievements of 14 great men, such as - Emerson, Goethe, George Bernard Shaw.
https://www.amazon.com/Last-Word-Portraits-Fourteen-Aphorists/dp/B0006CKMUA?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0006CKMUA
( The goal of Kings and Desperate Men is to provide a pic...)
The goal of Kings and Desperate Men is to provide a picture of eighteenth-century England up to the French Revolution. Kronenberger's work lies much closer to a social chronicle than an orthodox history, and is more concerned with manners and tastes than with treaties and wars. Kings and Desperate Men reveals what life was like for both aristocrats and commoners: their family lives, experience of larger society, habits, diet, fashions, religion, and artistic tastes. In tracing these topics for both city and country dwellers, he artfully communicates the very real division between the vivacity of London and the regular, fixed, and monotonous character of country life. The division is vital to understanding the age and the transformations it would experience. Yet Kronenberger does not ignore the more traditional historical landmarks. Kroenberger treats the characters of the leading political actors: Walpole, Bolingbroke, Burke, Fox, and Pitt, while providing the reader with a sweeping account of the formation of political parties and constitutional shifts of power between the monarchy and parliament. Students of the period who despair at its political complexities will fi nd much to appreciate in Kronenberger's condensed and easy to understand formulations. As for philosophy, Kronenberger refers to thinkers and ideas as they influence English life; especially Locke and Hume. Their ideas and reputations are explained as part of the character of society. The same is true for economics. More attention is given to the social gains of middle-class shopkeepers and the eighteenth-century zeal for stock speculation than to formal schools of thought. Especially notable is Kronenberger's treatment of both the arts and the artists of the eighteenth century-theatre, opera, music, literature, architecture, and painting.
https://www.amazon.com/Kings-Desperate-Men-Eighteenth-Century-England/dp/1412810701?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=1412810701
(Dustjacket is tattered and faded at edges.)
Dustjacket is tattered and faded at edges.
https://www.amazon.com/Animal-Vegetable-Mineral-Louis-Kronenberger/dp/0670127507?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0670127507
(1961 First Print Hardcover with Dust Jacket (Sealed in Br...)
1961 First Print Hardcover with Dust Jacket (Sealed in Brodart)
https://www.amazon.com/plays-1960-1961-Burns-Mantle-Yearbook/dp/B0007F23I0?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B0007F23I0
Louis Kronenberger was born on December 9, 1904 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Louis Kronenberger, a merchant, and Mabel Newwitter.
Kronenberger attended Hughes High School, then the University of Cincinnati from 1921 to 1924.
In 1926 Kronenberger obtained his first full-time position, as an editor for the publishing house Boni and Liveright, which published his first novel, The Grand Manner, in 1929. He joined the editorial staff of Alfred A. Knopf in 1933 and edited An Anthology of Light Verse (1935).
Kronenberger began his association with publisher Henry R. Luce's periodicals in 1936, first with Fortune magazine as a feature writer, then on that magazine's board of editors from 1936 to 1938. He became drama critic for Time magazine in 1938, where his reviews made him known nationally. In 1940 he became drama critic for PM magazine, a position he held until 1948, although he resumed writing for Time and continued to do so until 1961.
Kronenberger also had an extensive academic career: at Columbia University in New York City as lecturer on English Restoration drama 1950-1951; as a visiting professor at City College of New York, 1953-1954; at Stanford University in California in 1954 and 1963; at New York University in 1958; at Harvard in Massachusetts and Oxford in England in 1959; a return to Columbia University in 1961, a year in which he was also a Christian Gauss Seminar lecturer in criticism at Princeton University in New Jersey; and at the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. His lengthiest teaching stint was as professor of theater arts at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachussets, from 1952 to 1980. He also held the position of full-time librarian at Brandeis from 1963 to 1967.
Among his other noteworthy positions were director of the Writing Colony, Yaddo Corporation, in Saratoga Springs, New York; a consultant to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in New York City; a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, serving as secretary from 1953 to 1956; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Guggenheim Foundation, 1969-1970.
Kronenberger edited or compiled several literary collections, including The Portable Johnson and Boswell (1947), George Bernard Shaw (1953), Cavalcade of Comedy (1953), The Cutting Edge (1970), Atlantic Brief Lives (1971), and The Last Word (1972). He was particularly fond of the eighteenth century and its authors. He edited An Eighteenth Century Miscellany (1936) and wrote Kings and Desperate Men (1942) and Marlborough's Duchess (1958). The Thread of Laughter (1952), on English stage comedy, was applauded by literary critic Edmund Wilson as "the very best thing on the subject. " Wilson went on to ascribe genuine sophistication and polish to the work and wrote most aptly of Kronenberger's civilized attitude toward life and letters. His A Month of Sundays (1961) was valued as a richly imagined and sophisticated divertissement with an element of the fantastic. His memoirs, No Whippings, No Gold Watches (1970), best revealed Kronenberger's literary nature. Its modest subtitle is The Saga of a Writer and His Jobs. A quintessential man of letters, Kronenberger claimed only the title of writer. He rejected the placement of his memoirs in the category of autobiography, however, writing that he had merely produced a subjective memoir of places and people he worked at and with.
Kronenberger also wrote for the stage, and in all his writing and teaching guises he managed to be at the center of culture, observing the American scene, particularly from the 1930's to the 1950's, but his scholarly pursuits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries also shaped his personality as well as his journalistic endeavors. He was especially fond of the urbane conversation of literary and cultural figures and enamored of intellectual salons and literary parties. His relations with some of the most contentious contemporary figures, such as the authoritarian Luce and elegant Knopf, were genial. Kronenberger came closest to political associations while working at PM, where the staff adhered to a liberal-left position and some followed a hard-line Stalinist Communism. He was ill at ease with his colleagues at PM, his liberalness having more to do with literary culture than with political polemics. It is of interest that Kronenberger spent much of his life in publishing and with the theater as a critic, playwright, and friend of actors, producers, directors, but in his autobiography he wrote of the academic world and the literary world, not giving the dignity of the category "world" to either the theater or publishing. It would seem that he preferred the roles of tangential observer, commentator, and analyst to the rough competitive market arenas of theater and publishing.
He had moved in 1963 to Brookline, Massachussets, where he died after suffering from Alzheimer's disease for several years. His remarks about academia were unusually cogent. University life, he wrote, is as enclosed and anomalous as court life and in other ways is like the world of corporations despite the efforts of academics to disassociate themselves from the corporate style. While there are differences in enlightened views, cultural values, and disinterested goals, there are similarities in structures and hierarchy where titles and consciousness of them are important in both worlds. Such insights add to Kronenberger's achievements as a man of letters.
( The goal of Kings and Desperate Men is to provide a pic...)
(Lives and achievements of 14 great men, such as - Emerson...)
(1961 First Print Hardcover with Dust Jacket (Sealed in Br...)
(Dustjacket is tattered and faded at edges.)
(Dust jacket tattered and price clipped. Boards edge worn....)
(Hardcover: Under A's)
Quotations: "There seems to be a terrible misunderstanding on the part of a great many people to the effect that when you cease to believe you may cease to behave. "
Kronenberger married Emily L. Plaut on January 29, 1940, and they had two children.