George Stade, 85; scholar, novelist

George Stade, a Columbia University literary scholar who became an early champion of “popular” fiction within the academy and worked as a critic, editor and novelist, most notably with the grisly satire “Confessions of a Lady-Killer,” died Feb. 26 at a hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland. He was 85.

The cause was pneumonia, said his daughter, Nancy Stade.

A specialist in 20th-century British and American literature, Stade studied modernists such as James Joyce, William Faulkner and E.E. Cummings, and served as consulting editorial director of Barnes & Noble Classics as well as editor in chief of two literary series for Scribner.

But he was probably best known for helping to spearhead the study of popular fiction in the classroom, and for his frequent – and frequently acerbic – reviews and essays on contemporary literature.

Writing for publications including Partisan Review, Harper’s magazine and especially The New York Times, he championed horror writers such as Stephen King (“few writers around are better ... at giving readers what they want”) and decried the wussified state of “manist” literature in which male protagonists “retreat, admit defeat, take the heat, all with a sheepish grin.” He also attacked literary luminaries, including Iris Murdoch, whom he branded “a neo-Christian apologist” who “writes Harlequin romances for highbrows.”

“His literary tastes were, to say the least, of the bigtent variety,” said his former colleague Jean Howard, a Shakespeare scholar.