David Castaronovo, Ph.D., is a New York critic, literary historian, and humanities educator whose work concerns modern writers, English and American cultural life, and the history of ideas. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the late 1960s, he began publishing essays and reviews on Victorian subjects and thereafter wrote many encyclopedia articles and magazine pieces on topics ranging from the Irish Literary Renaissance to the history of the novel to 20th century literary criticism.
His first book, Edmund Wilson (1984), was a Notable Book of The New York Times. Reviewed here and abroad and praised by critics including James Atlas, John Gross, and Roger Rosenblatt, the book was the first major study of Wilson as man of letters. Castronovo followed his critical consideration with another book about an American of the Hemingway/Fitzgerald generation: Thornton Wilder (1986), an exploration of the work and life of an underrated modernist, was widely reviewed and recognized by Frank Kermode. Castronovo’s longtime interest in the Victorians comes through in his next book, The English Gentleman (1987). This literary-historical treatment of the social type employs classic and less well-known books and other sources--including courtesy manuals, treatises on the gentleman ideal, minor verse, memoirs--from medieval times through the 20th century to analyze the various acceptations of the word gentleman and the ways writers used them. The American Gentleman (1991), which follows the social type to the New World, emphasized the regional aspects of the ideal and showed its persistence in our literature. Louis Auchincloss commented that “David Castronovo has covered his interesting topic so fully and so masterfully that I doubt anyone will have to do it again.”
Pursuing his fascination with social types and class in literature, Castronovo collaborated with Steven Goldleaf, a colleague at Pace University in New York, on a study titled Richard Yates(1996), a book about the pioneering novelist who anatomized suburbia in Revolutionary Road. This volume, an Editor’s Choice of Ploughshares magazine, used the ideas of David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Erving Goffman to interpret Yates’s vision of 1950s middle class striving and disappointment.
Edmund Wilson has never disappeared from Castronovo’s writings and scholarly work. Collaborating with writer Anne Whitehouse, Castronovo published in Forward and elsewhere on Wilson and the Jews. He then worked with scholar Janet Groth on From The Uncollected Edmund Wilson (1995), a book which earned praise from Jason Epstein in The New York Review of Books and constitutes a collection of essays and reviews that stand beside volumes such as Wilson’s Shores of Light. Castronovo’s 1998 revision of his Edmund Wilson has a centenary introduction that deals with Wilson’s importance in our age of culture wars and with his controversial persona in his famous journals. Another volume done in collaboration with Janet Groth is Edmund Wilson, The Man in Letters (2001): here are personal letters--in print for the first time-- to Mary McCarthy, Isaiah Berlin, Cyril Connolly and many other writers and friends in Wilson’s long life. Castronovo and Groth next authored Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson (2005): the book was warmly praised in Vanity Fair by Elissa Schappell, cited by Louis Menand in The New Yorker, and credited in Publisher’s Weekly with being succinctly telling. Castronovo and his Pace colleague Robert Bove have prepared a website on Wilson: this resource is still under construction and includes scenes from Wilson’s life, including Princeton and Manhattan.
Castronovo’s fascination with 1950s literary culture and life has led him to take a wide-ranging look at America in Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books From the 1950s That Made American Culture. Critics in America and England considered the book “relevant and fresh” ( Brian Murray, The Weekly Standard) and “sensible and generous” (John Sutherland, The Sunday Times of London). His latest volume continues his investigation of the period and also explores the topic of masculinity in Britain: Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature profiles Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, and Kenneth Tynan, among many others in the 1950s and early 1960s, and connects them with a long tradition of masculine rebellion and aggression. The book places the writers and kindred forebears in vivid social context and analyzes the blokish aspects of New Britannia which began in the late 1950s and are alive today in the work of Martin Amis and Nick Hornby. Blokes completes the trajectory which started in The English Gentleman by dealing with the great movement from gentility to raw honesty. The Washington Times book critic Martin Rubin wrote that Castronovo “is not only superbly well-informed on his subject but has a flair for analyzing it in a uniquely revealing fashion.”
Castronovo has written many book reviews and articles for magazines and anthologies, including America, Commonweal, and New England Review. He is currently C. Richard Pace Professor at Pace University in New York City where he has taught since 1976. Further information about his life and work can be found in Contemporary Authors, Who’s Who I America, Who’s Who in the East, and Writers’ and Authors’ Who’s Who.
