Brendan Gill

Brendan Gill (October 4, 1914 – December 27, 1997) wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years. He also contributed film criticism for Film Comment and wrote a popular book about his time at the New Yorker magazine.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Gill attended the Kingswood-Oxford School before graduating in 1936 from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones. He was a long-time resident of Bronxville, New York, and Norfolk, Connecticut.

In 1936 The New Yorker editor St. Clair McKelway hired Gill as a writer. One of the publication's few writers to serve under its first four editors, he wrote more than 1,200 pieces for the magazine. These included Profiles, Talk of the Town features, and scores of reviews of Broadway and Off-Broadway theater productions.

Gill shocked literary circles in 1949 with his brutally devastating review of the novel "A Rage to Live," by John O'Hara. "During the preceding two decades O'Hara had been The New Yorker's most prolific contributor of stories" (no fewer than 197 by one count). Gil disparaged his colleague's book as "a formula family novel" turned out by "writers of the third and fourth magnitude in such disheartening abundance" and declared it "a catastrophe" by an author who "plainly intended to write nothing less than a great American novel." More recent critics have called Gill's review a "savage attack" and a "cruel hatchet job." Thereafter, O'Hara quit writing stories for the magazine for more than a decade, and when readers complained to Gill for driving O'Hara away, Gill deflected blame onto another New Yorker contributor, James Thurber, for stirring up animosity. At a forum on O'Hara's legacy held in 1996, Gill stood up in the crowd to recall his attack on O'Hara nearly 50 years before, rationalizing it by pleading, "I had to tell the truth about the novel."

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