Brendan Gill
Born
Brendan Gill

(1914-10-04)October 4, 1914
Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.
DiedDecember 27, 1997(1997-12-27) (aged 83)
Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Alma materYale University
Occupations
  • journalist
  • critic
  • writer
Years active1936–1996

Brendan Gill (October 4, 1914 – December 27, 1997) was an American journalist. He wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. Gill also contributed film criticism for Film Comment, wrote about design and architecture for Architectural Digest and wrote fifteen books, including a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.

Biography

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gill attended the Kingswood-Oxford School before graduating in 1936 from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, along with John Hersey.[1]: 127  He was a long-time resident of Bronxville, New York, and Norfolk, Connecticut.

In 1936, St. Clair McKelway, an editor at The New Yorker, hired Gill as a writer.[2] One of the publication's few writers to serve under its first four editors, he wrote more than 1,200 pieces for the magazine. These included Profiles, Talk of the Town features, and scores of reviews of Broadway and Off-Broadway theater productions.[3]

In 1949, Gill published a negative critique of John O'Hara's novel A Rage to Live.[4] Gill described his colleague's book as "a formula family novel" turned out by "writers of the third and fourth magnitude in such disheartening abundance" and declared it "a catastrophe" by an author who "plainly intended to write nothing less than a great American novel." One recent critic called Gill's review a "savage attack" and a "cruel hatchet job."[5] "During the preceding two decades O'Hara had been The New Yorker's most prolific contributor of stories"[6] (197 by one count).[7] Thereafter, O'Hara wrote nothing for the magazine for more than a decade.

In his memoir, Gill wrote that James Thurber — whom he described as an "incomparable mischief-maker" — compounded the animosity by falsely informing O'Hara that the review had been written by Wolcott Gibbs. "Thurber was never so happy as when he could cause two old friends to have a falling-out," Gill wrote. "With a single bold lie ... Thurber had ensured that O'Hara would see me as a jackal, willing to let my name be used for nefarious purposes ... and ... that Gibbs and O'Hara would quarrel."[8] At a forum on O'Hara's legacy held in 1996, Gill stood up in the crowd to recall his attack on O'Hara nearly 50 years before, and claimed, "I had to tell the truth about the novel."[9] In the end he expressed regret: "I am sorry now for that review ... not because of what it said, but because it provided Thurber with the opportunity to make our relationship come to nothing. We were not likely to have become close friends, but we need not have become enemies."[10]

As The New Yorker's main architecture critic from 1987 to 1996, Gill was a successor to Lewis Mumford as the author of the long-running "Skyline" column before Paul Goldberger took his place. He was also a regular contributor to Architectural Digest in the 1980s and 1990s. A champion of architectural preservation and other visual arts, Gill joined Jacqueline Kennedy's coalition to preserve and restore New York's Grand Central Terminal. He also chaired the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and authored 15 books, including Here at The New Yorker and the iconoclastic Frank Lloyd Wright biography Many Masks.

Death

Brendan Gill died of natural causes in 1997, at the age of 83. In a New Yorker "Postscript" following Gill's death, John Updike described him as "avidly alert to the power of art in general."[3]

Family

Gill's son, Michael Gates Gill, is the author of How Starbucks Saved My Life: A Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else.[11] His youngest son, Charles Gill, is the author of the novel The Boozer Challenge.

Offices held

Bibliography

Non-fiction

  • Gill, Brendan (January 15, 1949). "Runaway". The Talk of the Town. The New Yorker. 24 (47): 22–23.[lower-alpha 1]
  • Ross, Lillian & Brendan Gill (February 4, 1950). "The wildest people". The Talk of the Town. The New Yorker. 25 (50): 21–22.[lower-alpha 2]
  • Gill, Brendan (February 4, 1950). "Improvisation". The Talk of the Town. The New Yorker. 25 (50): 25.[lower-alpha 3]
  • Cole Porter (Cole Porter biography) (1972)
  • Tallulah (Tallulah Bankhead biography) (1972)
  • The introduction to Portable Dorothy Parker (Dorothy Parker collection of her stories & columns) (1972)
  • Here at The New Yorker (1975)
  • Biographical essay as introduction to “States of Grace: Eight Plays by Philip Barry” (1975)
  • Summer Places (with Dudley Whitney Hill) (1978)
  • The Dream Come True: Great Houses of Los Angeles (1980)
  • Lindbergh Alone - May 21, 1927 (1980)
  • Fair Land to Build in: The Architecture of the Empire State (1984)
  • — (January 14, 1985). "The ignominy of boyhood". The Theatre. The New Yorker. 60 (48): 108–110.[lower-alpha 4]
  • — (January 28, 1985). "Notes and comment". The Talk of the Town. The New Yorker. 60 (50): 19–20.[lower-alpha 5]
  • Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright (1987)
  • New York Life: Of Friends and Others (1990)
  • Late Bloomers (1996)

Novels

  • The Trouble of One House (1950)
  • The Day the Money Stopped (1957)

Short fiction

Collections
  • Ways of Loving (1974)
Stories
Title Year First published Reprinted/collected Notes
The night bus to Atlanta Esquire Gill, Brendan (1953). "The night bus to Atlanta". In Birmingham, Frederic A. (ed.). The girls from Esquire. London: Arthur Barker. pp. 105–113.

———————

Notes
  1. ↑ I Can Hear it Now - album of speeches and news broadcasts, 1932-45 (with Spencer Klaw).
  2. ↑ Transit Radio, Inc.
  3. ↑ Hiding telephone lines in the ivy at Princeton (with M. Galt).
  4. ↑ Reviews Bill C. Davis' "Dancing in the End Zone", James Duff's "Home Front" and Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I".
  5. ↑ West 44th Street development.

References

  1. ↑ Robbins, Alexandra (2002). Secrets of the Tomb: Skull and Bones, the Ivy League, and the Hidden Paths of Power. Boston: Little, Brown. ISBN 0-316-72091-7.
  2. ↑ Weingarten, Marc (February 14, 2010). "On the crime beat with St. Clair McKelway". Los Angeles Times.
  3. 1 2 Overbey, Erin (March 22, 2010). "Eighty-Five from the Archive: Brendan Gill". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved July 23, 2019.
  4. ↑ The New Yorker, August 20, 1949.
  5. ↑ Fran Lebowitz, forward to A Rage to Live, Modern Library Classics, 2004
  6. ↑ Philip B. Eppard, editor, Critical Essays on John O'Hara, G. K. Hall & Co., 1994
  7. ↑ Frank MacShane, editor, Collected Stories of John O'Hara, Random House, 1984
  8. ↑ Gill, Brendan (1997). Here at the New Yorker. New York: Da Capo Press. p. 294. ISBN 0306808102.
  9. ↑ William Grimes, "The John O'Hara Cult, at Least, Is Faithful" The New York Times, November 9, 1996
  10. ↑ Gill, Brendan (1997). Here at the New Yorker. New York, NY: Da Capo Press. p. 301. ISBN 0306808102.
  11. ↑ "Fired exec: 'Starbucks saved my life' - CNN.com". CNN. February 5, 2009. Retrieved April 26, 2010.
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