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Richard Poirier Dies at 83

Richard Poirier—critic, founder of Raritan, a founder of the Library of America, and author of Norman Mailer (1972), one of the first and sharpest studies of Mailer’s work—died in New York on August 15, 2009. He was 83.

Richard Poirier, a prolific and populist cultural critic who founded a literary journal, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, and who was a founder of Library of America, the nonprofit publisher of American classics, died in Manhattan on Saturday. He wrote admiringly of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Norman Mailer and the Beatles, finding in all of them a motivating sense of performance that made their otherwise disparate work comparably brilliant. He was 83.

Read more on the New York Times web site.

His life

Richard William Poirier was born on September 9, 1925, in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his father was a fisherman. He served in the Army in Europe during the Second World War, then took his degrees in English at Amherst (1949), Yale (1951), and Harvard (1959). He taught at Williams and Harvard before joining the English faculty at Rutgers in 1963, and stayed until he retired in 2002. At Rutgers in 1981 he founded Raritan. He joined the Library of America in its planning stages in 1977, and served on its board until 2006, when he stepped down as chairman (Washington Post, August 21, 2009).

He was a critic and man of letters in the line of Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, and Alfred Kazin, the Post wrote, and he ranged from Henry James and Frost to “Learning from the Beatles,” his 1967 essay in Partisan Review on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He reviewed often for the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and his reviews could be sharp (New York Times, via History News Network; LRB blog, August 20, 2009). He died on August 15, 2009, at Roosevelt Hospital in New York, of injuries from a fall at his home, according to his friend the poet Frederick Seidel. He had no immediate survivors.

Poirier and Mailer

Poirier wrote on Mailer through the 1960s and into the 1970s. When the New York reviews of An American Dream came in badly in 1965, Mailer wrote to John Aldridge that “only Richard Poirier in Commentary will be good”; Poirier’s review, “‘Morbid-Mindedness,’” appeared there that June—“a very warm review,” Lennon later called it— and was later collected in Robert F. Lucid’s Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work (1971) (Works and Days: letter to Aldridge, April 23, 1965; the novel’s reception). In 1967 he and Mailer were among the writers who answered Partisan Review’s symposium on Cassius Clay’s refusal of the draft (“In Clay’s Corner”), and in January 1971 he gave Of a Fire on the Moon a mixed review, “Ups and Downs of Mailer,” in the New Republic (Works and Days).

His idea of “the performing self,” from his book of that name (1971), stayed with Mailer’s readers. James Atlas drew on it in the New York Times Magazine in 1979 (“Life with Mailer”), and Gerald Howard quoted it in the New York Times Book Review nearly three decades later (Works and Days). The next year came Norman Mailer (Viking, 1972), in the Modern Masters series—in J. Michael Lennon’s judgment, “perhaps the most perceptive study of the first half of Mailer’s career” (note to the Aldridge letter, Norman Mailer’s Letters on An American Dream, 2004). The Society lists it among the key texts for Mailer studies, and it turns up in its bibliographies, among them Jason Mosser’s selective bibliography of “The White Negro”. Lennon’s Supplemental Checklist of Mailer criticism for the Society, compiled in 2006, carries Poirier’s later collection Trying It Out in America (1999), subtitled there Literary and Other Performances; the Post gave the subtitle as Literary and Other Performers.

Lennon, in “Why Mailer Matters”, recalled Poirier’s verdict that Mailer was Melville without Moby-Dick, George Eliot without Middlemarch, Mark Twain without Huckleberry Finn, and answered that with The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song Mailer had his Walden and his Crime and Punishment. As late as 2026, writing in The Monthly, Martin McKenzie-Murray still counted Poirier among Mailer’s sharper critics (Works and Days).

In Works and Days

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