George Steiner, "a literary polymath and man of letters whose voluminous criticism often dealt with the paradox of literature's moral power and its impotence in the face of an event like the Holocaust," died February 3, the New York Times reported. He was 90. An essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic, Steiner succeeded Edmund Wilson as senior book reviewer for the New Yorker from 1966 until 1997.
In his book Grammars of Creation, based on the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1990, he observed that essential to his views "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate."
His more than two dozen books included essay collections, a novella and three collections of short stories. Among them were Errata: An Examined Life (1998), Tolstoy or Dostoevsky (1959), The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (1981), My Unwritten Books (2009), Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman (1967), In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (1971) and After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (1975).
"I'd love to be remembered as a good teacher of reading," he told the Paris Review in 1994, adding that reading should "commit us to a vision, should engage our humanity, should make us less capable of passing by."
Steiner's honors included the Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French Government, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Truman Capote Award for lifetime achievement in literary criticism, the Associated Press reported, adding that his Capote citation read: "His European and Jewish heritage inform his powerful, sometimes bleak but never pessimistic perspective. Perhaps his most distinguished achievement is that in the process of writing such criticism, he has re-cast the traditional role and identity of the critic itself. In his generous, fearless, challenging prose he has looked at the limits of language, as well as its powers and at the deceptions of the intellect as well as its discoveries."