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| Stanley Crouch | |
Author, essayist and columnist Stanley Crouch, "the fiercely iconoclastic social critic who elevated the invention of jazz into a metaphor for the indelible contributions that Black people have made to American democracy," died September 16, the New York Times reported. He was 74.
Describing himself as a "radical pragmatist," Crouch once observed: "I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of reasoning across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race."
The Times noted that "he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization.... By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience."
After moving to New York in 1975, Crouch wrote for the Village Voice, "where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer," the Times wrote. As a syndicated columnist he was long based at the New York Daily News.
Crouch's anthologies include Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989 (1990); The All-American Skin Game, or, The Decoy of Race: The Long and the Short of It, 1990-1994 (1995); Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, 1995-1997 (1998); and Considering Genius: Writings on Jazz (2006). He also published fiction, Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing (2000), and biography, with Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (2003).