Stanley Kauffmann

Stanley Kauffmann (April 24, 1916 – October 9, 2013) was an American writer, editor, and critic of film and theater.

Kauffmann started with The New Republic in 1958 and contributed film criticism to that magazine for the next 55 years, publishing his last review in 2013. He had one brief break in his New Republic tenure, when he served as the drama critic for The New York Times for eight months in 1966.

He worked as an acquisitions editor at Ballantine Books in 1953, where he acquired the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Several years later, while working as an editor at Alfred A. Knopf in 1959 he discovered a manuscript by Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Following a year of rewrites and revisions, the novel was published in 1961, and it won a National Book Award in 1962.

Kauffmann was a long-time advocate and enthusiast of foreign film, helping to introduce and popularize in America the works of directors such as Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Yasujirō Ozu. He inspired and influenced younger film and cultural critics such as Roger Ebert and David Denby.

Kauffmann was also a professor of English, Drama, and Film at City University of New York (Hunter College, York College, and the Graduate Center) (1973–76) and taught at the Yale School of Drama.[when? ]

Kauffmann was featured in the 2009 documentary For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism where he was shown discussing the beginnings of film criticism in America, and noting the important contributions of poet Vachel Lindsay, who grasped that "the arrival of film was an important moment in the history of human consciousness".[10]

Kauffmann is noted for his dissenting opinions on otherwise critically acclaimed films, giving negative reviews for Brazil, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Million Dollar Baby, Gone with the Wind, Becket and 2001: A Space Odyssey, films that were heavily praised by other notable critics.

Kauffmann attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and New York University, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1935, and he was an actor and stage manager with the Washington Square Players. Kauffmann married Laura Cohen in 1943, and they remained together until Cohen's death in 2012. They did not have children. Kauffmann died of pneumonia at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on October 9, 2013, at age 97.[11]