The death of Hilton Kramer this morning, two days after his 84th birthday, deprives the intellectual world of one of its brightest lights and his friends of a raconteur and aphorist as spellbinding and pithy as Doctor Johnson, with a breadth of knowledge, command of detail, and elegance of prose to match. He was one of the last of the New York Intellectuals—that band of opinionated, pugnacious, and fiercely intelligent writers and thinkers who did so much to shape the twentieth-century American mind, who made our city the nation’s (and perhaps the world’s) unquestioned intellectual capital, and whose stature and seriousness seem all the larger as their numbers dwindle and their voices grow still.
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