Background
Schwartz, Richard Brenton was born on October 5, 1941 in Cincinnati. Son of Jack Jay and Marie Mildred (Schnelle) Schwartz.
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book
Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio (Ohio History and Culture)
(In a series of stories drawn from his own experiences com...)
In a series of stories drawn from his own experiences coming of age during the 1950s, Richard B. Schwartz revisits his boyhood in southern Ohio. His memories of adolescence bring back the birth of rock and roll, the rigors and absurdities of religion and parochial schools, trials of little league baseball, grueling summer construction work and caddying jobs, the thin pleasure of 3.2% beer, drag racing lore, and, of course, the youthful discovery of sex. By turns hilarious and poignant, satiric and nostalgic, the book focuses on a period and place through its feeling on innocent immediacy, and distanced because of the awareness developed in the intervening decades. If the memoir expresses a sense of loss at the passing of good times, it also exhibits a sense of relief at the end of those awkward years. Richard B. Schwartz has written a book that will appeal to many readers, whatever their age, but perhaps especially to those who remember the fifties as they were and as they might have been, when we grew up yearning for slow dances and fast cars, and every little town seemed like the biggest city in America.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/188483650X/?tag=2022091-20
By Richard B Schwartz - The Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio (Ohio Hist (1999-10-16) Paperback
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003Q94XSM/?tag=2022091-20
After the Death of Literature
( Calling Samuel Johnson the greatest literary critic sin...)
Calling Samuel Johnson the greatest literary critic since Aristotle, Richard B. Schwartz assumes the perspective of that quintessential eighteenth-century man of letters to examine the critical and theoretical literary developments that gained momentum in the 1970s and stimulated the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. Schwartz speculates that Johnson—who revered hard facts, a wide cultural base, and common sense—would have exhibited scant patience with the heavily academic approaches currently favored in the study of literature. He considers it probable that the combatants in the early struggles of the culture wars are losing energy and that, in the wake of Alvin Kernan’s declaration of the death of literature, new battlegrounds are developing. Ironically admiring the orchestration and staging of battles old and new—"superb" he calls them—he characterizes the entire cultural war as a "battle between straw men, carefully constructed by the combatants to sustain a pattern of polarization that could be exploited to provide continuing professional advancement." In seven diverse essays, Schwartz calls for both the broad cultural vision and the sanity of a Samuel Johnson from those who make pronouncements about literature. Running through and unifying these essays is the conviction that the cultural elite is clearly detached from life: "Academics, fleeing in horror from anything smacking of the bourgeois, offer us something far worse: bland sameness presented in elitist terms in the name of the poor." Another theme is that the either/or absolutism of many of the combatants is "absurd on its face and belies the complexities of art, culture, and humanity." Like Johnson, Schwartz would terminate the divorce between literature and life, make allies of literature and criticism, and remove poetry from the province of the university and return it to the domain of readers. Texts would carry meaning, embody values, and have a serious impact on life.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080932136X/?tag=2022091-20
Frozen Stare (The Jack Grant Mysteries)
(Jack Grant, Vietnam vet turned L.A. private eye, spends h...)
Jack Grant, Vietnam vet turned L.A. private eye, spends his days busting small-time insurance defrauders. But his latest client gives him the cold shoulder―literally― when he turns up dead in a tub of ice. Another body in a downtown meat freezer is only the second in a chilling series of murders. Soon Jack is plunged into a murky underworld of Chilean exiles where evil masquerades as virtue and nothing is as it seems. The first book in the Jack Grant mystery series, Frozen Stare is guaranteed to give you goosebumps.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0738708283/?tag=2022091-20
Richard Brenton Schwartz
Edit Profileuniversity dean writer English language educator
Education
AB cum laude, U. Notre Dame, 1963; AM, University of Illinois, 1964; Doctor of Philosophy, University of Illinois, 1967.
Career
Instructor English, United States Military Academy, 1967-1969; assistant professor, University of Wisconsin -Madison, 1969-1972; associate professor, University of Wisconsin -Madison, 1972-1978; professor, University of Wisconsin -Madison, 1978-1981; associate dean, University of Wisconsin -Madison (Graduate School), 1977, 79-81; Professor of English, dean, Graduate School, Georgetown University, Washington, 1981-1998; interim executive vice president for main campus academic affairs, Graduate School, Georgetown University, Washington, 1991-1992; interim executive vice president for the main campus, Georgetown University, Washington, 1995-1996; Professor of English, dean College Arts and Science, U. Missouri, Columbia, since 1998. Member Executive Board Center Strategic and International Studies, 1981-1987.
Achievements
Works
book
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Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio (Ohio History and Culture)
(In a series of stories drawn from his own experiences com...)
-
After the Death of Literature
( Calling Samuel Johnson the greatest literary critic sin...)
-
Frozen Stare (The Jack Grant Mysteries)
(Jack Grant, Vietnam vet turned L.A. private eye, spends h...)
- By Richard B Schwartz - The Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio (Ohio Hist (1999-10-16) Paperback
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Biggest City in America: A Fifties Boyhood in Ohio (Ohio History and Culture)
Membership
Served to captain United States Army, 1967-1969. Member Mystery Writers American, Johnson Society Southern California, Johnson Society of London, American Society Eighteenth-Century Studies, Council Graduate Schools, N.E. Association Graduate Schools (Executive Committee 1986-1988), Association Graduate Schools in Catholic Universities (Executive Committee 1984-1987), Association Literary Scholars and Critics, N. American Conference British Studies, Alpha Sigma Nu, Alpha Sigma Lambda.
Connections
Married Judith Mary Alexis Lang, September 7, 1963. 1 son, Jonathan Francis.
