Claiborne, Craig

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Craig Claiborne, 1920–2000, American food journalist, restaurant critic, and cookbook author, b. Sunflower, Miss., studied École Hôtelière de Lausanne, Switz. After settling in New York and writing articles for Gourmet magazine, he joined The New York Times (1957) and during his 29 years there served as food editor and, at various times, restaurant critic, in the process inventing a style of sophisticated food journalism that persists to this day. Claiborne played an important role in introducing Americans to a wide range of European and Asian cooking. He wrote more than 20 cookbooks (many with Pierre Franey), which did much to enrich the cooking of ordinary Americans. His New York Times Cook Book (1961) was a longtime bestseller.

See his autobiography (1982); biography by T. McNamee (2012).