Morris Dickstein, critic and cultural historian, dies at 81

Morris Dickstein, a literary critic, cultural historian and City University of New York professor who was among the last of the first generation of Jewish public intellectuals reared on the Lower East Side, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 81.

His daughter, Rachel Dickstein, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

A baby-faced scholar who studied at Columbia, Yale and the University of Cambridge, Dickstein could ruminate on Keats and Allen Ginsberg as well his recollections of his immigrant parents and the campus upheaval at Columbia University when he taught there in the late 1960s (“pot, but no LSD, protest but no ‘days of rage’”) — all in a single paragraph — and still seem completely syllogistic.

His books often challenged conventional wisdom and were sometimes prescient. He argued in “Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties” (1977) that the political turmoil of the decade, as Christopher Lasch wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “tended to undermine the distinction between high culture and popular culture and to make popular culture an object of serious discussion.”

“Gates of Eden” was 111 nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. His “Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression” (2009) was a finalist for that award.

Dickstein also wrote “Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 19451970” (2002), which makes the case that novelists like Jack Kerouac and Ralph Ellison sowed doubts in the supposedly placid 1950s that blossomed into the culture wars of the 1960s; “A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature in the Real World” (2005); and a memoir, “Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education” (2015).

He frequently wrote for The Times Literary Supplement in Britain and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. He also wrote film criticism for Partisan Review.

He was a distinguished professor of English, theater and performance, and liberal studies at the City University Graduate Center, where he also founded the Center for the Humanities in 1993.

Morris Dickstein was born Feb. 23, 1940, in Manhattan to Abraham and Anne (Reitman) Dickstein, refugees from Eastern Europe. His father was a shipping clerk.

Morris was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family and attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Yeshiva on the Lower East Side for 12 years. After enrolling in Columbia on a General Motors scholarship, he also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary to broaden his religious education.

He was looking forward to a career in either journalism (he was editor of the Columbia Daily Spectator) or law until his sophomore year, when he read books by two of Columbia’s most distinguished scholars: Jacques Barzun’s “Teacher in America” (1946) and Lionel Trilling’s “The Liberal Imagination” (1950). Both books persuaded him to pursue professionally what he found most satisfying as a student: literary criticism.

“The idea of teaching others to love books as a career was a gift,” Rachel Dickstein said. “Reading and writing about what he was reading was his passion.”

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1961. After receiving a master’s from Yale in 1963, he studied for two years at Clare College, Cambridge, and then returned to Yale, where he earned a doctorate in 1967 under Harold Bloom. His thesis was titled “The Divided Self: A Study of Keats’ Poetic Development.”

In his memoir, Susie Linfield wrote in The Times Book Review, “We see