Anatole Broyard Biography Quotes 13 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Anatole Paul Broyard was born on July 19, 1920, in New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Creole family whose complex color line realities would later shape his public and private identities. He grew up in a milieu where French-inflected manners, Catholic sensibility, and Southern racial codes coexisted uneasily. That early atmosphere taught him, before he had language for it, that personality could be a kind of authorship - revised, edited, performed.

In the 1930s his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, and Broyard came of age in the city that would become his subject and stage. He learned to pass as white, a decision both strategic and costly, opening doors in mid-century literary culture while demanding silence about origins. The tension between appetite and concealment, intimacy and distance, became a lifelong psychic engine: he wanted the full experience of American modernity, yet he paid for it in divided loyalties and guardedness at home.

Education and Formative Influences

Broyard studied at Brooklyn College, absorbing the era's argumentative humanism - Freud in the air, modernism on the syllabus, politics on the street - before serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. Returning to New York, he gravitated to Greenwich Village and the postwar downtown scene where jazz, existentialism, and the small magazine ecosystem trained him to value style as a moral stance. He read voraciously and cultivated a persona of urbane skepticism, learning to write criticism not as academic judgment but as a lived response.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

In the late 1940s and 1950s he published fiction, essays, and criticism in little magazines and helped found the literary journal New World Writing, positioning himself inside the postwar conversation about taste, freedom, and American prose. His reputation widened with essays later gathered in works such as Aroused by Books, which presented reading as an erotic, conversational act rather than a dutiful one. He became best known as a daily book critic and then a prominent reviewer at The New York Times, where his crisp judgments and personal tone made criticism feel like social intelligence. A decisive late turning point came with his AIDS diagnosis in the late 1980s; he transformed terminal illness into literary inquiry in the essays collected as Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death, and in the posthumous memoir-like volume Kafka Was the Rage, which returned to his youth with a mixture of confession and curation.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Broyard's criticism was never merely about books; it was a way of testing how to live. He wrote like a cultivated friend at a cafe table - quick, analogical, skeptical of solemnity - and he treated taste as a form of autobiography. His most characteristic move was to turn interpretation into self-scrutiny, as if every novel were a mirror and every judgment a revelation. He prized the lively reader who answers back, insisting that reading is a transaction of energy and temperament: "The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable". That line captures his psychology - pleasure mixed with control, intimacy managed through pacing, devotion expressed as a kind of delay.

Underneath the elegance ran a persistent awareness of doubleness: the self as performance, the public as theater, history as a place one visits but cannot own. His essays repeatedly circle the idea that modern life is less a coherent plot than a succession of revisions, a felt argument with oneself: "The tension between "yes" and "no", between "I can" and "I cannot", makes us feel that, in so many instances, human life is an interminable debate with one's self". In his hands, that debate was not only philosophical but biographical, sharpened by passing and by the critic's job of saying yes and no for a living. He also carried a cool, postwar irony about progress and memory - the sense that we inhabit time like visitors, collecting insight rather than victory: "We are all tourists in history, and irony is what we win in wars". The sentence reads like a worldview carved by the 20th century: skeptical, worldly, and quietly wounded.

Legacy and Influence

Broyard endures as a model of the critic as stylist and of criticism as a branch of personal literature - an art of presence rather than system. His late illness writing helped legitimize candid, aesthetically ambitious accounts of dying, while his earlier essays influenced generations of reviewers who learned from him that intelligence can be intimate and that judgments can be pleasurable on the page. After his death on October 11, 1990, debates over his concealed racial identity reframed his work in a harsher light, yet also clarified its central drama: a man who made a life out of reading others while editing the story of himself.