Krutch, Joseph Wood (1893–1970), born in Tennessee, graduated from the state university (1915), and received his Ph.D. from Columbia (1923). He was long on the faculty of Columbia (1925–31, 1937–52) and on the editorial staff of
The Nation (1924–52) mainly as a drama critic. His books include
Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), an analytical biography employing psychoanalysis;
The Modern Temper (1929), a pessimistic analysis of contemporary life, by a “modern intellectual” who finds that science has destroyed his faith in a beneficent universe, and psychology his belief in his own nobility, so that he “finds only in the pursuit of knowledge that which makes life worth living”;
Five Masters: A Study in the Mutations of the Novel (1930), an analysis of Boccaccio, Cervantes, Richardson, Stendhal, and Proust, to determine whether their greatness springs from the life of their times or from an essential universality; scholarly biographies,
Samuel Johnson (1944) and
Thoreau (1948); and
The Measure of Man (1954), a return to the themes of
The Modern Temper, with a humanistic plea for “Moral Discourse.” After he moved to Arizona many of his books dealt with natural history, the Western scene, and a humanist's view of man and his environment, including
The Desert Year (1952),
The Great Chain of Life (1957),
Human Nature and the Human Condition (1959), and
The Forgotten Peninsula; A Naturalist in Baja California (1961).
More Lives Than One (1962) recalls his varied experiences.
