Morris Dickstein dies

Literary critic and public intellectual

Morris Dickstein, a public intellectual who examined such topics as the cultural ferment of the 1960s, the artistic legacy of the Depression and the evolution of the American novel in works that were both penetrating and penetrable, offering a model of what he regarded as the ideal role of the critic in modern society, died March 24 at his home in Manhattan.

He was 81.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Lore Willner Dickstein. He taught for four decades at the City University of New York, where he founded the Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities.

Dickstein was part cultural historian, part literary critic. His emergence followed the postwar heyday of the public intellectual, when such heavyweights as Irving Howe, Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer battled for ideas in pages of magazines such as Dissent and Commentary and embodied what writer Jonah Raskin described as a “mystique” that extended far beyond the salon and the ivory tower.

“We could round up the usual suspects,” Dickstein remarked, endeavoring to explain the forces that had conspired to push him and his colleagues to the margins — “the turn toward theory, jargon, professionalization; the decline of the centrality of literature among the arts, followed by the decline of book culture itself; the separation of academics from the wider world of general readers; the collapse of literary journalism.”