Parker Tyler

{{Short description|American writer (1904–1974)}}

{{Use mdy dates|date=November 2023}}

{{Infobox person

| name = Parker Tyler

| image = Parker_Tyler.jpg

| birth_date = {{Birth date|1904|03|06}}

| birth_place = New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.

| death_date = {{death date and age|1974|07|24|1904|03|06}}

| death_place = New York City, New York, U.S.

| resting_place =

| occupation = Author, poet, film critic

| years_active =

| known_for = Screening the Sexes

| notable_works = The Young and Evil

| education =

| partner = Charles Boultenhouse (1945–1974)

| relatives =

}}

Harrison Parker Tyler (March 6, 1904 – July 24, 1974), was an American author, poet, and film critic. Tyler had a relationship with underground filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse (1926–1994) from 1945 until his death. Their papers are held by the New York Public Library.{{Citation

|last = Stingone

|first = William

|title = Charles Boultenhouse and Parker Tyler Papers, 1927–1994

|publisher = New York Public Library

|date = August 1997

|url = http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/rbk/faids/boultenh.pdf

|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20110727084050/http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/spe/rbk/faids/boultenh.pdf

|url-status = dead

|archive-date = July 27, 2011

}}

He often wrote for the View, the Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Evergreen Review, and the cineaste magazines Film Culture, and Film Quarterly. Some of his books are collections of his magazine work. He received a Longview Award for Poetry in 1958.{{citation needed|date=January 2019}} He wrote a biography about modernist painter Florine Stettheimer.{{cite book |last1=Tessler |first1=Nira |title=Flowers and Towers: Politics of Identity in the Art of the American "New Woman" |date=2015 |publisher=Cambridge Scholars Publishing |isbn=9781443886239 |pages=115 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=j7IPCwAAQBAJ&q=Parker+Tyler+stettheimer&pg=PA115 |language=en}}

Tyler was mentioned several times in the novel Myra Breckinridge (1968) by Gore Vidal, bringing renewed attention to Tyler's film criticism.{{Cite book|last=Bordwell|first=David|title=The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture|publisher=University of Chicago Press|year=2016|isbn=978-0226352206|pages=112}} This led Vidal to claim that "I've done for [Tyler] what Edward Albee did for Virginia Woolf" after The Hollywood Hallucination and Magic and Myth of the Movies were republished in 1970.

Black Sparrow Press published his poetry, including a complete and corrected text of The Granite Butterfly, first published with Bern Porter, Berkeley, Calif., 1945, as The Will of Eros: Selected Poems 1930-1970 (1972).

Tyler died in New York City, where he lived, on July 24, 1974, at the age of 70.{{cite web |title=PARKER TYLER, 70, A WRITER ON FILMS |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1974/07/26/archives/parker-tyler-70-a-writer-on-films.html |website=The New York Times |access-date=July 17, 2023}}

Works

Tyler's books of film criticism include:

  • The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age, 1944)
  • Magic and Myth of the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1947)
  • Chaplin: Last of the Clowns (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1948)
  • The Three Faces of the Film: the Art, the Dream, the Cult (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1960)
  • Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictorial Treasury (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1962)
  • Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1969)
  • The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew: A Biography (Fleet Publishing, 1967)
  • Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Grove Press, 1969)
  • Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972)
  • The Shadow of an Airplane Climbs the Empire State Building (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973)
  • A Pictorial History of Sex in Films (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1974)

References

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