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Jack Richardson, 1934-2012

| @jpodhoretz 07.05.2012 - 10:48 AM

It is customary for novelists to serve as occasional or frequent literary critics, analyzing the work of others who write novels. The same cannot be said of playwrights, who rarely write prose about the theater and almost never about the plays of others. The singular exception to this was Jack Richardson, who began writing about the theater for COMMENTARY in the mid-1960s when he was still considered one of the up-and-coming playwrights in the United States. He died this week at the age of 78. He wrote for the magazine on and off for about a decade, as his own promising career in the theater dwindled and then died out—articles of exceptional interest, intelligence, and cultivation. In tribute to his passing, we are making available eight of his best, including two that weren’t about the theater—a memoir of life as a gambler and a brilliant review of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift that angered Bellow because, I suspect, he knew Richardson saw through to that novel’s fatal weaknesses.

•On Reviewing Plays, September 1966

•Groping Toward Freedom: The Living Theatre, May 1969

•Musical Wastes, February 1971

•From Plato to Las Vegas, October 1974

•The English Invasion, February 1975

•Looking Back at “The Waste Land,”August 1975

•Humboldt’s Gift, by Saul Bellow, November 1975

•Alas, Poor Hamlet, April 1976

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