Joseph Wood Krutch Biography Quotes 18 Report mistakes

18 Quotes
Occup.	Environmentalist
From	USA
Born	November 25, 1893
Died	May 22, 1970
Aged	76 years

Early Life and Education
Joseph Wood Krutch was born in 1893 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in a region where the edges of town met fields and woods, an environment that would later color his sensibility as a naturalist. After local schooling he attended the University of Tennessee, where his academic gifts and wide reading drew him toward literature, criticism, and the history of ideas. He continued his studies at Columbia University in New York, immersing himself in English literature and the traditions of moral and aesthetic criticism. In New York he formed lasting friendships, most notably with the poet and critic Mark Van Doren, whose companionship and intellectual camaraderie helped shape Krutch's early ambitions. The two young scholars shared an appetite for travel and conversation, and their informal salons among fellow students and writers foreshadowed the milieu Krutch would inhabit for decades.

Critic, Essayist, and The Modern Temper
Krutch began his career as a critic and essayist with a firm belief that literature could diagnose the temper of an age. He wrote for magazines and journals at a moment when American letters were attempting to take the full measure of modernism, science, and social upheaval. His breakthrough, The Modern Temper (1929), captured that restless assessment. In it Krutch probed the implications of a mechanistic worldview, asking whether the rise of scientific explanation, stripped of metaphysical consolation, risked undermining human dignity and moral purpose. He did not reject science; rather, he challenged the notion that scientific reductionism exhausted the meaning of experience. The book's tone was often skeptical and even somber, reflecting cultural anxieties that followed the First World War and the rapid changes of the 1920s. Yet it showed Krutch's characteristic trait: the willingness to confront unsettling questions without surrendering to easy formulas.

The Nation and a Public Voice
In the mid-1920s Krutch became the drama critic for The Nation, a post he held for many years, and through which he became widely known. His theater reviews and essays were not merely consumer guidance; they linked stagecraft to the moral and intellectual climate of the country. Working with editors at The Nation during an era when the magazine was a crucible for progressive debate, he refined a style that balanced judgment with openness to innovation. His circle in New York included writers and teachers who helped define mid-century criticism. At Columbia he later taught alongside colleagues who also bridged campus and public spheres, among them Mark Van Doren and, in overlapping years, figures like Lionel Trilling. Krutch's public voice grew out of this overlap between the university, the little magazines, and the city's performing arts.

Scholarship and Biographical Craft
Krutch's scholarship brought him into conversation with minds that had long preoccupied Anglo-American letters. His studies of Samuel Johnson explored the moral imagination of the great English essayist, while his essays returned repeatedly to the moralists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for orientation in a bewildering age. He also edited and introduced works by Henry David Thoreau, whose measured independence and attention to nature would become increasingly central to Krutch's mature outlook. Through these projects Krutch established himself as a critic of character and temperament as much as of texts, tracing how habits of mind leave their signatures on a writer's style and arguments.

Turn Toward Nature
During and after the Second World War, Krutch's preoccupations shifted. A lifelong walker and observer, he began writing nature essays that married precise observation with philosophical reflection. The change did not cancel his earlier concerns; rather, it reframed them. Where The Modern Temper had asked whether a disenchanted world could sustain meaning, the nature essays proposed that careful attention to living things reveals sources of value not reducible to equations. He wrote about fields, gardens, and seasons; about birds, insects, and desert plants; about the patience required to know a place. In this writing he combined a dramatist's eye for scene with the critic's sense of implication, suggesting that a grammar of gratitude and restraint could be learned from the nonhuman world.

Arizona and the Desert Books
After years in New York, Krutch moved to the American Southwest, settling in Arizona. The Sonoran Desert, its light and austere forms, became central to his days and his prose. The Desert Year and later books such as The Voice of the Desert drew readers into a landscape often stereotyped as empty. Krutch showed it to be crowded with specialized life and intricate relations: cacti storing water against months of dryness, migrations timed to ephemeral rains, and survival strategies that were a kind of teaching. He wrote about the saguaro as both organism and emblem, about the habits of pack rats, and the sudden green after storms. His descriptive patience, free of sentimentality yet suffused with wonder, helped shape a mid-century American readership newly attentive to ecology.

Environmental Thought and Humanism
Krutch's environmentalism was inseparable from his humanism. In essays that would culminate in books like The Measure of Man, he argued that the defense of human dignity and the defense of wild nature were allied tasks. A purely utilitarian calculus, he suggested, would impoverish both. By insisting that nonhuman creatures possess their own forms of excellence, he sought to enlarge moral imagination rather than merely instruct behavior. His polemics were gentle: he preferred persuasion through example, patient description, and the modest assertion that joy and decency depend on limits. These concerns resonated with the rising conservation and environmental ethos that, in the 1950s and 1960s, drew broad public attention. Although working from a literary perch rather than a laboratory, Krutch anticipated themes that later became central to popular environmental writing: the critique of hubris, the call to humility, and the insistence that knowledge must include sympathy.

Colleagues, Friends, and Intellectual Companions
The people around Krutch mattered to the course of his ideas. Mark Van Doren remained a friend across decades, a reminder of the humane scale of criticism they both prized. At Columbia, teaching and conversation with colleagues helped him maintain a dialogue between scholarship and public life. In New York and later in Arizona he cultivated friendships with naturalists, park advocates, and desert scholars who shared his attention to place, even when he stood apart as a literary voice among scientists. Across time his most intimate intellectual companions were often authors long dead: Samuel Johnson, whose moral gravity he admired, and Henry David Thoreau, whose example of attentive independence confirmed Krutch's belief that a life devoted to observation and reflection could be a civic contribution.

Memoir and Late Work
In later years Krutch turned back on his own path in a memoir, More Lives Than One, recounting his passage from student to critic to desert essayist. The title acknowledged the phases of a career that seemed to take on new identities without repudiating the old. He also wrote about the American Southwest's emblematic spaces, including the Grand Canyon, drawing together geological time, visitor experience, and the ethics of preservation. These late books extended his conviction that to measure a landscape well is to measure oneself, not in the spirit of conquest but of understanding.

Style and Method
Krutch's prose remained lucid, wary of jargon, and steeped in the older essay tradition. Even when he argued against a scientific reductionism, he did not oppose science per se; he objected to the idea that quantification alone could settle questions of value. His method was to offer the felt weight of firsthand experience alongside disciplined reading, to let the saguaro or the house wren stand as evidence in a debate about meaning. The continuity from theater criticism to desert naturalism becomes clear in this regard: both called for attention to form, to the interplay of parts, to the way a scene unfolds in time.

Legacy
Joseph Wood Krutch died in 1970 in Arizona, having spent his final decades giving American readers new ways of seeing an arid land and, through it, the human condition. He is remembered as a writer who refused to choose between the claims of reason and the claims of reverence. In classrooms his criticism retains a place as a record of mid-century debates about modernity; in field guides and conservation circles his name is linked to a literature that helped foster respect for the American desert. Readers who came to him through The Modern Temper encountered a mind willing to ask unsettling questions; those who came through The Desert Year found a companion willing to sit quietly and learn. Across these phases one finds the same core impulse: to examine what we love, to inquire into what we fear, and to keep faith with the possibility that attention itself is a moral act.

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