British literary critic Frank Kermode dies at age 90

Frank Kermode taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Cambridge University. (Orion Publishing)

Frank Kermode, 90, an English literary critic who wrote masterfully, and in a digestible fashion, on a range of interests, including Shakespeare, the Bible and Kurt Vonnegut, died Aug. 17 in Cambridge, England. No cause of death was reported.

Considered one Britain's most prolific and admired academics -- he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991 -- Mr. Kermode's critiques were often praised for their graceful prose and fresh perspective. He wrote his first book at age 20 and his last, on the works of E.M. Forster, this past year.

He became embroiled in controversy for a short time in the 1960s as the editor of the British literary and political journal Encounter, after reports came out that the magazine was secretly funded by the CIA. Mr. Kermode said that he was ignorant of the scheme and promptly resigned from his post.

John Frank Kermode was born Nov. 29, 1919, in Douglas, on the Isle of Man, about 80 miles off the west coast of England in the Irish Sea.

Read the whole story at The Washington Post, by T. Rees Shapiro

Frank Kermode, 90, a Critic Who Wrote With Style, Is Dead

Photograph: Miriam Berkley
Frank Kermode about 1998.

Frank Kermode, who rose from humble origins to become one of England’s most respected and influential critics, died Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

His death was announced by The London Review of Books, which he helped create and to which he frequently contributed.

The author or editor of more than 50 books published over five decades, Mr. Kermode was probably best known for his studies of Shakespeare. But his range was wide, reaching from Beowulf to Philip Roth, from Homer to Ian McEwan, from the Bible to Don DeLillo. Along the way he devoted individual volumes to John Donne, Wallace Stevens and D. H. Lawrence. Unrelentingly productive, he published “Concerning E. M. Forster” just last December.

Mr. Kermode’s critics sometimes faulted him for a deliberately difficult style and what Mr. Lodge called “intellectual dandyism.” Although in “The Art of Telling” Mr. Kermode suggested that innovative French approaches to literary criticism like structuralism and deconstructionism might eventually find at least some place in the mainstream, he took to task some of the more radical attempts to subvert traditional texts through gender or racial perspectives. In “An Appetite for Poetry” (Harvard, 1989) he reaffirmed his belief in the value of reading literary classics as a way of gauging both ideals of permanence and the forces of change.


Read the whole story at The New York Times, by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt