Crouch, Stanley

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Crouch, Stanley

December 14, 1945

Critic and essayist Stanley Crouch was born in Los Angeles, where he was raised by his mother, Emma Bea Crouch, a domestic. During his boyhood he became fascinated by jazz music. In 1965, after attending school and junior college in Los Angeles, he was inspired by the Watts riot to become involved in the Black Power and black arts movements, and he joined the Watts Repertory Theatre Company as an actor and writer. In 1968 Crouch was hired by California's Claremont College as an instructor, and he later became the first full-time faculty member of the Black Studies Center.

By 1975 Crouch left Claremont and moved to New York. Disenchanted with black nationalism, he became a disciple of writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who celebrated the centrality of blacks in a pluralistic American culture. He joined the staff of the weekly Village Voice as a jazz and cultural critic, where he remained until 1989. At the Voice Crouch became controversial for his forthright critiques of modern jazz, African-American literature, and other subjects. Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990), a collection of his Voice columns, was a finalist for the National Book Award.

During the 1990s Crouch worked as a freelance scholar and essayist and functioned as an advisor to the Lincoln Center Jazz Program. In 1993, Crouch won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of $296,000. He joined the New York Daily News as a columnist in 1995. Always In Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives, a collection comprised mostly of his Daily News columns, was published in 1998.

Crouch was further honored as the 2002–2003 Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor of Jazz Studies at Columbia University. His collection The Artificial White Man: Essays on Authenticity was published in 2004.