Frank Kermode, 90, a Critic Who Wrote With Style, Is Dead

By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times
Published: August 18, 2010

Frank Kermode, who rose from humble origins to become one of England’s most respected and influential critics, died Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.

Left - Frank Kermode about 1998.
Photo - Miriam Berkley

His death was announced by The London Review of Books, which he helped create and to which he frequently contributed.

The author David Lodge called Mr. Kermode “the finest English critic of his generation,” and few disagreed with that assessment.

The author or editor of more than 50 books published over five decades, Mr. Kermode was probably best known for his studies of Shakespeare. But his range was wide, reaching from Beowulf to Philip Roth, from Homer to Ian McEwan, from the Bible to Don DeLillo. Along the way he devoted individual volumes to John Donne, Wallace Stevens and D. H. Lawrence. Unrelentingly productive, he published “Concerning E. M. Forster” just last December.

His collections of literary criticism and lectures — among them “The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction” (Oxford University Press, 1967 and 2000), “The Genesis of Secrecy” (Harvard University Press, 1979) and “The Art of Telling: Essays on Fiction” (Harvard, 1983) — became standard university texts. The poet and critic Allen Tate called “The Sense of an Ending” “a landmark in 20th-century critical thought.”

Mr. Kermode also wrote for the general book-reading audience, chiefly in The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, and his judgments were typically measured but pointed, whether reviewing Philip Roth, John Updike or Zadie Smith. His pungent take on Updike’s series of “Bech” novels managed at once to express a certain awe at the writer’s talents while discounting the books in question, calling them “works of the left hand.”
More at NYT.

And a tribute in The Guardian