Noel Parmentel

Noel E. Parmentel, Jr., was a leading figure on the New York political journalism, literary, and cultural scene during the third quarter of the 20th Century.

Born in 1926 in Algiers (a part of greater New Orleans), Parmentel attended Tulane University after service in the Marine Corps, and migrated to New York in the 1950s. There he quickly became a prominent fixture in literary circles and in political journalism, "the tall, shambling New Orleans freelance pundit," known for his witty essays, usually targeting those he considered "phonies," be they of the left or the right. "Anyone who knew anything about New York then knew Noel," wrote Dan Wakefield in New York in the Fifties, describing Parmentel's making "a fine art of the ethnic insult," dining out on his "reputation for outrageousness," and savaging the right in The Nation, the left in National Review, and both in Esquire. He was "a respecter of no race or tradition or station," his style "that of an axe-murderer, albeit a funny one," in the words of his early protégé John Gregory Dunne;William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote admiringly of Parmentel's "vituperative art." In the New York of the day, though "phonies" were proportionately distributed among the political classes, the left was more numerous than the right; Parmentel thus had the reputation in some circles of being an arch-conservative, which in fact he was not. (Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, credited Parmentel with introducing the much-quoted line about Richard Nixon, "Would You Buy a Used Car From This Man?".) Those he respected as not "phonies" included such varied figures as the sociologist C. Wright Mills, the politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Tammany Hall boss Carmine DeSapio, and Father James Harold Flye, mentor of James Agee.

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