Richard Lingeman, a magazine editor and author who wrote an acclaimed study of small-town America and biographies of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis "that helped revive interest in those once-towering American novelists," died on July 5, the New York Times reported. He was 95.
As a journalist, Lingeman and Victor S. Navasky founded the satirical magazine Monocle in the late 1950s. He went on to serve as an editor at the New York Times Book Review and, in 1978, was named executive editor of the Nation. After 18 years in the position, Lingeman stepped down to become a senior editor at the magazine, a role that gave him more time to write books.
His most notable early work, Small Town America: A Narrative History 1620-the Present (1980), "examined the development and decline of American towns, from the earliest Puritan settlements to the Midwestern trading centers and the cow towns and mining camps of the West," the Times noted.
Critic John Leonard wrote in the Times that the book presented a world of "authoritarians and conformists, speculators and real-estate sharpies, absentee landlords and vigilantes, bankers without enough money and railroad entrepreneurs with too much money, bribery and racism and false fronts and a class system as oppressive as anything to be found in old Europe."
Lingeman published two volumes devoted to Dreiser. In Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871-1907 (1986) and Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908-1945 (1990), Lingeman praised the author for his role in elevating American literature. "Out of his passions, contradictions and suffering," Lingeman observed in the second volume, noting Dreiser's bouts of debilitating melancholy and volatile romantic affairs, "he wrenched the art that was his salvation from the hungers and depressions that racked him."
Reviewing the first volume in the Times, Cynthia Ozick contended that the biography did not sufficiently strive to resolve the great Dreiser riddle: How could "a workhorse daily journalist" possibly "transform himself into a novelist of such encompassing, gritty, recalcitrant power"? But writer and literary critic Alfred Kazin called the complete work "a fascinating documentation of the most troubled life led by any important modern American writer."
Lingeman's biography Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street (2002) was part of his lifelong pursuit to "understand the role of the small town in American history," he said. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, author Keith Taylor called Lingeman's book "the most important re-evaluation of Lewis in more than a generation," adding that he demonstrated convincingly that Lewis had influenced writers as varied as Richard Wright and John Updike, the New York Times noted.
Early in his career, Lingeman freelanced for other publications and wrote two books, about prescription drugs (Drugs from A to Z, 1969) and America's home front during World War II (Don't You Know There's a War On?, 1970). In 1969, he joined the Times Book Review, where he remained for nine years, assigning reviews and compiling a weekly column of publishing news, "Book Ends," before Navasky recruited him for the Nation.
Lingeman's last book, The Noir Forties (2012), was "an examination of how a moody and often cynical film genre that flourished after World War II reflected the anxieties of battle-scarred veterans, a repressive political period and the Cold War in an atomic age," the Times wrote.