Morris Dickstein (February 23, 1940 â March 24, 2021) was an American literary scholar, cultural historian, professor, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.
A leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, film, literary criticism, and popular culture, Dickstein's work has appeared in both the popular press and academic journals, including The New York Times Book Review, Partisan Review, TriQuarterly, The New Republic, The Nation, HarperâÂÂs, New York Magazine, Critical Inquiry, Dissent, The Times Literary Supplement, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Slate, and Bookforum.
Dickstein was a contributing editor to Partisan Review from 1972-2003 and a member of the board of directors for the National Book Critics Circle. He was a member of the National Society of Film Critics and former president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics.
Dickstein was the author of several books on American literature and culture, including ' (1977), which was named one of the âÂÂBest Books of 1977â by The New York Times Book Review; Double Agent: The Critic and Society (1992); Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945 â 1970 (2002); A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (2005); and Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009), which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. The late author Norman Mailer called Dickstein âÂÂone of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature.âÂÂ
On March 24, 2021, Dickstein died of complications from Parkinson's disease at his home in Manhattan at the age of 81.
Dickstein was born in New York City to Jewish émigrés from Europe. He grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was raised Orthodox Jewish. Dickstein attended a Yeshiva for 12 years before doing his undergraduate work at Columbia University. During this period Dickstein also attended the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in order to âÂÂmodernizeâ the Hebrew education he had received during his time at the Yeshiva. At JTS, Dickstein studied under Abraham Joshua Heschel. Moving away from Orthodox Judaism, Dickstein dropped out of the Seminary after three and half years, during his final semester of undergraduate work at Columbia.
Initially thinking he would become a journalist or lawyer, during his sophomore year at Columbia Dickstein read Jacques BarzunâÂÂs Teacher in America and Lionel TrillingâÂÂs The Liberal Imagination. These works convinced him that he could continue to do professionally what he loved to do as a studentâÂÂread and write about literature. The Liberal Imagination introduced Dickstein to âÂÂliterary criticism as an art and a calling.â Dickstein graduated from Columbia with a B.A. in 1961 and an M.A. from Yale in 1963. From 1963 to 1964 he studied at Clare College, Cambridge, before returning to Yale to receive his PhD in 1967. Harold Bloom directed Dickstein's dissertation, entitled The Divided Self: A Study of Keatsâ Poetic Development.
For the majority of his professional career, Dickstein taught in the CUNY system, chiefly at Queens College and at CUNY Graduate Center, while maintaining strong ties with Columbia via the school's âÂÂSeminar on Theory of Literatureâ and the "Seminar on American Studies." Additionally, he served on the board of trustees for the Columbia Daily Spectator since 1977. He founded The Center for the Humanities at CUNY Graduate Center in 1992. He was named âÂÂDistinguished Professor of Englishâ by CUNY in 1994.
Published in 2009 by W.W. Norton & Company, Dickstein's cultural history of the U.S. in the 1930s considers the complicated dynamic between art and entertainment in the decade, suggesting that the era produced a wide array of popular culture that shares an interest in how âÂÂordinary people lived, how they suffered, interacted, took pleasure in one another, and endured.â A sizable portion of Dancing in the Dark focuses on what is typically thought of as "escapist" entertainment from the decade. The book is filled with extended analyses of the decade's most popular sorts of entertainment: the musicals of Busby Berkeley, the performances of Humphrey Bogart, the films of Frank Capra, and the dance routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It also contains lengthy analyses of movements and works that are typically thought of as "high culture": the Art Deco movement, the novels of William Faulkner, Orson Wellesâ Citizen Kane, and the orchestral pieces of Aaron Copland.
Maureen Corrigan at NPR calls Dancing in the Dark âÂÂa penetrating work of cultural historyâ and âÂÂa thrill to readâ because of Dickstein's âÂÂzesty voiceâ and âÂÂlightly worn erudition.â The book was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.
Published in 2002 by Harvard University Press, Leopards in the Temple is a collection of essays about post-WWII U.S. fiction, film, and culture. Dickstein's work in this book provides a corrective to the common characterization of the 1950s as a time exclusively of conformity and conservatism. He identifies the âÂÂstrong radical undercurrents that led directly to the culture wars of the 1960sâ through a close examination of the âÂÂstream of outsider figures who would do more than anything else to define the character of postwar writingâÂÂ: Ralph Ellison, Flannery OâÂÂConnor, Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac, among others. Authors of popular literary fiction in the 1950s, these writers expressed deeply felt cultural anxieties about conformity, race, technology, and patriarchy, even as the culture-at-large was in the midst of unparalleled economic prosperity. Dickstein points to the popularization of FreudâÂÂs theories, and to the Film Noir of the period, in order to deflate the âÂÂselective cultural memoryâ of the 1950s as a time of âÂÂsunny, even mindless optimism.âÂÂ
The Los Angeles Times writes that Leopards in the Temple is the most âÂÂlucid and enjoyably written study of postwar American fiction to have come along in years.âÂÂ