Krutch, Joseph Wood

Krutch, Joseph Wood kro͝och [key], 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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