Krutch, Joseph Wood

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Joseph Wood Krutch (krŏŏch), 1893–1970, American author, editor, and teacher, b. Knoxville, Tenn., grad. Univ. of Tennessee, 1915, Ph.D. Columbia, 1923. He was on the editorial staff of the Nation (1924–52), and held a professorship at Columbia (1937–53). Highly regarded as a social and literary critic, Krutch's writings include Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), The Modern Temper (1929), Samuel Johnson (1944), and Henry David Thoreau (1948). After he moved to Arizona, he turned to the study of nature; his books in this field include The Twelve Seasons (1949) and The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation (1955).

See his autobiography, More Lives than One (1962); A Krutch Omnibus: Forty Years of Social and Literary Criticism (1970); The Best Nature Writings of Joseph Wood Krutch (1970).

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