Joseph Wood Krutch

{{Short description|American author, critic, and naturalist (1893–1970)}}

{{Infobox person

| name = Joseph Wood Krutch

| image = Joseph Wood Krutch.jpg

| alt =

| caption =

| birth_name =

| birth_date = {{Birth date|1893|11|25}}

| birth_place = Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S.

| death_date = {{Death date and age|1970|5|22|1893|11|25}}

| death_place = Tucson, Arizona, U.S.

| other_names =

| occupation = {{flatlist|

Writer
critic
naturalist

}}

| education = University of Tennessee
Columbia University

| years_active =

| known_for = {{flatlist|

Pantheistic philosophy
ecology
conservation

}}

| notable_works =

}}

Joseph Wood Krutch ({{IPAc-en|k|r|uː|tʃ}};{{cite Merriam-Webster|Krutch}} November 25, 1893 – May 22, 1970) was an American author, critic, and naturalist who wrote nature books on the American Southwest. He is known for developing a pantheistic philosophy.

Biography

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he was educated at the University of Tennessee and received a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University.Rowley, Robert. (1995). Joseph Wood Krutch: The Forgotten Voice of the Desert. The American Scholar 64 (3): 438–443. After serving in the army in 1918, he traveled in Europe for a year with his friend, Mark Van Doren. Following World War I, he taught English composition at Brooklyn Polytechnic.Joseph Wood Krutch, More Lives than One. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1962.{{rp|118}}

In 1924, Krutch became the theater critic for The Nation, a position he held until 1952.{{rp|131}}

As an author, Krutch first achieved prominence when he published The Modern Temper in 1929. There he challenged then-fashionable notions of scientific progress and optimism, arguing that science leads logically to a bleak view of the human condition.{{rp|319}} In the 1940s he wrote widely read biographies of Samuel Johnson and Henry David Thoreau and—largely inspired by Thoreau—published his first nature book, The Twelve Seasons (1949).

From 1937 to 1952, he served as a professor of English at Columbia University, where he was a popular lecturer. In 1955, Krutch won the National Book Award for The Measure of Man (1954). In that work, he partially retreated from the gloomy pessimism of his early years and argued that there are aspects of human beings, such as reason, consciousness, free will, and moral judgment, that cannot be explained by mechanistic, deterministic science.{{rp|321–326}}

After moving to Tucson, Arizona in 1952, partly for reasons of health, Krutch wrote several books about natural issues of ecology, the southwestern desert environment, and the natural history of the Grand Canyon, winning renown as a naturalist, nature writer, and an early conservationist. Like Aldo Leopold, who greatly influenced him, Krutch believed that human beings must move beyond purely human centered conceptions of "conservation" and learn to value nature for its own sake.Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert: A Naturalist's Interpretation. New York: William Sloane Associates, 1954, pp. 186207.

In The Great Chain of Life that he published in 1956, was a chapter entitled "The Vandal and the Sportsman". In that chapter he wrote, "When a man wantonly destroys one of the works of Man we call him Vandal. When he wantonly destroys one of the works of God we call him Sportsman."Krutch, Joseph Wood, [https://books.google.com/books?id=Ydc0cooCB6QC&pg=PA146 "The Vandal and the Sportsman"], The Great Chain of Life (1956), Chapter 9, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2009, p. 148.

Krutch defended the use of clichés in writing.{{cite magazine|last=Krutch|first=Joseph|title=Great Cliche Debate; In reply to Bergen Evans, who denounced cliches, Mr. Krutch argues there are times when the cliche is le mot juste. Great Cliche Debate (Cont.)|date=August 31, 1958|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1958/08/31/archives/great-cliche-debate-in-reply-to-bergen-evans-who-denounced-cliches.html|magazine=The New York Times Magazine|access-date=13 May 2023|url-access=subscription}}

Krutch developed a pantheistic philosophy.Holtz, William. (1974). We Didn't Mind His Saying So: Homage to Joseph Wood Krutch: Tragedy and the Ecological Imperative. The American Scholar 43 (2): 267–279. Historian Donald Worster commented that Krutch "became a kind of pantheist or ethical mystic, caught up in the joy of belonging to something greater than one's self."Worster, Donald. (1994). [https://books.google.com/books?id=Sb02AAAAQBAJ&dq=%22kind+of+pantheist+or+ethical+mystic%22&pg=RA1-PT296 Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas]. Cambridge University Press. {{ISBN|978-0521468343}}

=Notable family members=

His brother, Charles Krutch, was the renowned Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) photographer. His uncle, Charles Christopher Krutch, was a painter known for his depiction of Smoky Mountain scenes.{{Cite news|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/28/obituaries/charles-krutch-tennessean-photographed-tva-growth.html|title=Charles Krutch, Tennessean; Photographed T.V.A. Growth|newspaper=The New York Times|date=October 28, 1981}}{{Cite web|url=https://knoxvilletn.gov/government/city_departments_offices/parks_and_recreation/parks/krutch_park|title = Krutch Park}}

Death

At the age of 76, Krutch died from colon cancer at his home in Tucson, Arizona on May 22, 1970.{{Cite news |url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/arizona-daily-star-joseph-wood-krutch-c/164379823/ |title=Joseph Wood Krutch, Critic and Scholar, Dies |first=Jeff |last=Smith |newspaper=Arizona Daily Star |pages=1, [https://www.newspapers.com/article/arizona-daily-star-joseph-wood-krutch-c/164379868/ 4] |date=1970-05-23 |access-date=2025-01-31 |via=Newspapers.com}} One of the last interviews with Krutch before his death was conducted by Edward Abbey and appears in Abbey's 1988 book, One Life at a Time, Please ({{ISBN|0805006036}}).

Legacy

Many of Krutch's manuscripts and typescripts are held by the University of Arizona, where the Joseph Wood Krutch Cactus Garden was named in his honor in 1980.[http://arizonaalumni.com/news-multimedia/traditions/cactus-garden "The Joseph Wood Krutch Cactus Garden"] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070928042413/http://www.uagrad.org/Alumnus/Spring02/cactus.html |date=2007-09-28 }}, University of Arizona Alumnus magazine, Spring 2002. Upon his death, The New York Times lauded Krutch in an editorial, declaring that concern for the environment by many young Americans "should turn a generation unfamiliar with Joseph Wood Krutch to a reading of his books with delight to themselves and profit to the world."Krutch, The Voice of the Desert, back cover.

Selected works

Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926)
The Modern Temper (1929)
Experience and Art: Some Aspects of the Esthetics of Literature (1932)
The American Drama Since 1918: An Informal History (1939)
Samuel Johnson: A Biography (1944)
Henry David Thoreau (1948)
The Twelve Seasons (1949)
A Kind of Pantheism The Saturday Review (10 June 1950) 33: 7–8, 30–34
The Desert Year (1951)
The Best of Two Worlds (1953)
The Measure of Man (1954)
The Voice of the Desert (1954)
The Great Chain of Life (1956)
The Grand Canyon: Today and All Its Yesterdays (1957)
The Sportsman or the Predator? A Damnable Pleasure The Saturday Review (August 17, 1957): pp. 8–10, 39–40. Concerning "killing for sport"[https://books.google.com/books?id=-sQkzvM64aoC&dq=a+damnable+pleasure+krutch&pg=PA64 Wildlife and People: The Human Dimensions Of Wildlife Ecology], cited by Gary G. Gray (1995 University of Illinois Press), p. 64. Retrieved January 31, 2025 – via Google Books.[https://www.jstor.org/pss/3781278 Article title detail at JSTOR.] Found at Google search "a damnable pleasure krutch."
Human Nature and the Human Condition (1959)
The Forgotten Peninsula (1961)
The World of Animals; A treasury of lore and literature by great writers and naturalists from the 5th century B.C. to the present (1961)
More Lives Than One (1962)
And Even If You Do; Essays on Man, Manners, and Machines (1967)
The Best Nature Writing of Joseph Wood Krutch (anthology, University of Utah Press, 1995; {{ISBN|0874804809}})

References

External links

{{Gutenberg author|id=6634|name=Joseph Wood Krutch}}
{{Internet Archive author|sname=Joseph Wood Krutch}}
[https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4079552 Finding aid to Joseph Wood Krutch papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.]

Category:1893 births

Category:1970 deaths

Category:20th-century American biographers

Category:20th-century American male writers

Category:20th-century American non-fiction writers

Category:American environmentalists

Category:American male non-fiction writers

Category:American nature writers

Category:American technology writers

Category:American theater critics

Category:Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni

Category:Columbia University faculty