Anatole Broyard Biography Quotes 13 Report mistakes

Early Life
Anatole Paul Broyard was born on July 16, 1920, in New Orleans, into a Creole family whose complex ancestry included African American roots. His parents moved north when he was young, and he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The city became both a formative landscape and a lifelong subject: its streets, storefronts, classrooms, and cafes supplied him with a vocabulary of sensibility as much as with a set of experiences. His early inclinations toward literature and art flourished amid the crosscurrents of immigrant neighborhoods and the modernist influences that swept through New York in the interwar years.

War and Postwar Transition
Broyard served in the U.S. Army during World War II, an experience that interrupted his budding literary ambitions but also placed him in a generation that would return from Europe to remake American letters. After the war, he settled in Greenwich Village, opened a small bookstore, and joined the cultural ferment that gathered in coffeehouses and editorial offices, as well as in cramped apartments where manuscripts were read aloud and careers were improvised. He contributed short stories and essays to literary magazines and found contemporaries whose arguments, enthusiasms, and ambitions sharpened his own. The Village milieu, with figures like Delmore Schwartz among its presiding spirits and critics such as Dwight Macdonald shaping debates, provided a proving ground for Broyard's style and standards.

Emergence as a Writer
In the late 1940s and 1950s, Broyard's short fiction and criticism began to attract attention for their lucidity and wit. He prized a prose that moved cleanly, and he could compress an aesthetic judgment into a nimble aside. He was alert to how taste is formed, by books, yes, but also by friendships, by the mood of a neighborhood, by the way one looks at paintings or hears music. He distrusted pomposity and favored the intimate authority of the essayist who writes as an equal among readers. His work from this period framed the stance he would carry into his later career: skeptical of grand theories, attentive to sentences, and convinced that discernment was a civic as well as literary virtue.

New York Times Critic
Broyard joined The New York Times as a book critic and became widely known in the 1970s and 1980s for daily reviews that brought a distinctive voice to the paper's coverage of contemporary writing. He wrote swiftly but with poise, balancing summary, quotation, and crisp judgment. Colleagues in and around the Times, including John Leonard and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, helped define an era when the daily newspaper review could set a tone for the national conversation. Broyard's pieces often read like dispatches from a literary front, alive to fashion, wary of cant, and eager to identify fresh talent while holding established names to high standards.

Style and Sensibility
His criticism fused erudition with conversational ease. He liked books that made intelligence audible and distrusted performances that confused obscurity with depth. He could be tart, even severe, but his writing also revealed curiosity and delight when the work warranted it. He tended to place literature within a broad, humane context: how a novel held the reader's attention, the way a poem navigated feeling without sentimentality, how an essay opened a window rather than closing a door. To those who read him regularly, the byline promised a test of proportion. Whether he was assessing a long-awaited novel or a first collection, he tried to keep the writer's ambitions in view and the reader's experience at the center.

Greenwich Village Memoir
Late in life, Broyard turned his attention back to the world that had launched him. The memoir Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir, published posthumously, reconstructs the postwar Village with affectionate precision: used-book basements, painters' studios, and the talk, always the talk, that assigned reputations and dissolved them. The book introduces a gallery of friends, lovers, and fellow travelers in literature and art, giving an intimate portrait of a neighborhood that fancied itself the capital of sensibility. In those pages one senses not only the allure of the bohemian experiment but also its costs and self-delusions.

Identity and the Question of Passing
Broyard's ancestry, long known within his family, not always acknowledged in public, became a subject of widespread discussion after his death. For much of his adult life he presented himself as white, a decision shaped by midcentury American racial hierarchies and by his determination to be seen principally as a writer. The choice separated him from aspects of his past and complicated some personal relationships, and it has remained a focal point of assessments of his life and work. After his death, critics and scholars debated what his story reveals about race, ambition, and the literary world's gatekeeping. Henry Louis Gates Jr. weighed in on the historical and cultural dimensions of passing, while Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain was widely read as drawing inspiration in part from Broyard's predicament. The conversation extended to newsrooms and seminar rooms, with journalists such as Brent Staples also addressing the subject, and it inevitably circled back to the texture of Broyard's own sentences, what they declared, what they withheld, and what they made possible.

Family and Later Years
Broyard married and had two children, including the writer Bliss Broyard, whose later work would examine family history and the complexities of identity across generations. In the late 1980s he was diagnosed with cancer, and he responded in the only way a lifelong essayist could: by writing. The pieces collected posthumously in Intoxicated by My Illness consider how meaning persists in the face of bodily decline, how candor can be a form of nourishment, and how style may serve as both shield and instrument of discovery. The essays are unsentimental and bracing, suffused with the same appetite for clarity that marked his criticism.

Death and Posthumous Reputation
Anatole Broyard died on October 11, 1990. In the years that followed, his reputation settled into a double legacy: as a critic whose sentences were models of proportion and as a figure whose life provoked searching conversations about race, self-fashioning, and American literary culture. Friends and contemporaries who had shared tables with him in Greenwich Village or newsrooms in Midtown remembered the quickness of his wit and the steadiness of his standards. Younger readers encountered him through his memoir and his essays on illness, and through the arguments his story continued to spark among novelists, critics, and historians.

Legacy
Broyard's work invites readers to imagine criticism not as a set of decrees but as a mode of companionship, one reader speaking to another, testing impressions in real time. That stance, combined with his attention to craft, helped shape how a generation read contemporary fiction and nonfiction. The debates about his racial identity, spurred in part by writings from Bliss Broyard and by commentary from figures such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., ensure that his name also marks a crossroads: between personal privacy and public identity, between the pressures of a segregated past and the demands of a more searching present. Through it all, the measure he preferred remains available on the page: a belief that intelligence, when carried in supple prose, can still tell us what matters in a book, and sometimes, what matters in a life.

Our collection contains 13 quotes who is written by Anatole, under the main topics: Wisdom - Friendship - Meaning of Life - Writing - Parenting.