Robert Warshow - Biography

Robert Warshow (1917–1955) was an American author, a critic and essayist, who wrote about film and popular culture for Commentary magazine and The Partisan Review in the mid-20th century. He was born and resided in New York City and attended the University of Michigan.

Among the articles published in Warshow's short lifetime were "The Westerner" and "The Gangster as Tragic Hero", analyses of the Western movie and the gangster movie genre from a cultural standpoint. He also penned essays praising playwright Clifford Odets as well as George Herriman's newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat. "The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg" showed the executed American Stalinists in a brutally honest light. In an critique of The Crucible Warshow argued that Arthur Miller was not as competent a dramatist as was perceived. After Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman, Warshow was the first serious critic to write about the "video nasties" of his day, E C Comics and its Mad magazine.

Warshow died of a heart attack at the age of 37. Most of his published work was collected in the book The Immediate Experience in 1962, expanded in 2001.

Compare

Gilbert Seldes, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, James Agee, Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael

Book

• Robert Warshow: Immediate Experience. Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1962. 282 pp. With a contribution by Lionel Trilling.
• Robert Warshow: The Immediate Experience. Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2001. 302 pp. Expanded reprint, including Lionel Trilling, new contributions from David Denby and Stanley Cavell.

External links

• The Study of Man: Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham. In: Commentary Magazine, June 1954.
• Stanley Cavell & Robert Warshow a brief tribute in French.