David
Castronovo, Ph.D., is a New York critic, essayist, and humanities educator
whose work largely concerns modern literature, English and American social life,
and the history of ideas. As a graduate student at Columbia University in the late
1960s, he began publishing reviews of cultural history and Victorian subjects
and thereafter wrote many encyclopedia articles and magazine pieces on topics
ranging from the Irish literary Renaissance to contemporary fiction to American
critical theory and practice in the 20th century.
His first book, Edmund Wilson
(1984), was a Notable Book of The New York Times. Reviewed here and
abroad, and praised by critics including John Gross and James Atlas.
His study of Thornton Wilder (1986), a book focused on Wilder’s role as
a man of letters rather than on the familiar playwright of Our Town, was
cited by reviewers for its strong claims for Wilder the modernist.
His next book, The English Gentleman (1987), was a
literary-historical treatment of the social ideal, employing classic and less
well known books and other sources from medieval times through the 20th
century to analyze the various acceptations of the type and show how English
writers have used them. Castronovo
followed this volume with a companion book titled The American Gentleman
(1991), a study that emphasized the regional aspects of the ideal and showed its
persistence in American literature in the 20th century.
His work on the art of fiction also yielded a long essay on the
development of the novel since the 17th century.
Moving into contemporary fiction,
Castronovo collaborated with Steven Goldleaf, a colleague at Pace University in
New York and an American literature specialist, on a sociological–literary
book about Richard Yates (1966), the pioneering novelist who anatomized suburbia
in Revolutionary Road. This
study, an Editor’s Choice of Ploughshares magazine, used the ideas of
David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Erving Goffman to interpret Yate’s vision
of post–WW II middle class striving and disappointment.
Castronovo also collaborated with the writer and reviewer Anne Whitehouse
on essays involving Edmund Wilson and Jewish culture.
Castronovo’s work with scholar
Janet Groth on From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson earned praise from Jason
Epstein in The New York Review of Books in 1995 and constitutes a
collection of essays and reviews that stand beside volumes such as Wilson’s The
Shores of Light. Castronovo’s
1998 revision of Edmund Wilson has a new centenary essay that deals with
Wilson’s importance in our age of culture wars and with his controversial
persona in the journals. His latest
volume on the uncollected correspondence of Wilson -- also in
collaboration with Groth -- is
Edmund Wilson, the Man in Letters,
which includes letters to Mary McCarthy, Isaiah Berlin, and Cyril Connolly
among other writers and friends in Wilson’s long life.
He has prepared a website on
Wilson
in collaboration with
Robert
Bové, a writer, poet and faculty member at Pace, New York.
Castronovo lately writes reviews and
large pieces for collections and magazines such as Commonweal and the New
England Review and is also doing a book on American literary culture in the
1950s. Further information about
his life and work can be found in Contemporary Authors, Who’s Who in
the East, Who’s Who in America, and Writers’ and Author’s
Who’s Who.
