One of America's most provocative social critics, Stanley Crouch, was born in Los Angeles, California on December 14, 1945. Encouraged by his mother, Crouch began writing at the age of eight. He attended the East Los Angeles and Southwest junior colleges, but has no degrees. His writings have appeared in Harper's, TheNew York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The Amsterdam News, The New Republic, The Partisan Review, The Reading Room, and The New Yorker. He has served as an Artistic Consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987 and is a founder of the Jazz department known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. His collection of essays and reviews, Notes of a Hanging Judge, was nominated for an award in criticism by the National Book Critics Circle and was selected by the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook as the best book of essays published in 1990.Crouch
has since appeared on a number of talk shows-Nightline,
Night Watch, The Tony Brown Show, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie
Rose, and others. In October of 1991, he was one of
the recipients of the Whiting Writers' Award, an award
given to "writers of exceptionally promising talent."
Recipient of both the Jean Stein Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters and a MacArthur Foundation
grant, Crouch has authored a collection of essays, The
All-American Skin Game. His first novel, Don't
The Moon Look Lonesome, appeared in 2000. A new
book of essays on identity, The Artificial White
Man, appeared in the fall of 2004.
Stanley
Crouch enjoys delighting and enraging his readers with
his two-fisted observations on every controversial aspect
of American polity, society and culture, be it the excesses
of Black nationalism, feminism, the gay rights movement,
or American social policy. Recipient of a MacArthur
Foundation "genius" award, Stanley Crouch
has been hailed by the New Yorker as "one
of America's most outspoken and controversial critics...
an independent thinker, unconstrained by affiliation
with any camp, creed, or organization." The online
literary magazine salon.com calls him "the bull
in the Black intelligentsia china shop." He is
undoubtedly one of the most important commentators on
African-American culture and its relationship with mainstream
c. An ardent proponent of the integrationist
view of American life, Crouch is quick to oppose any
definition of African-American culture that segregates
it from the mainstream. In his view, even "affirmative
action" is problematic because it resegregates
African-Americans by giving them preferential treatment.
In several interactions with Nibir K Ghosh, carried
out during February to April 2004, Crouch spoke about
art, life, literature and politics. |
