Seymour Krim (May 11, 1922 – August 30, 1989) was an American author, editor and literary critic. In the 1950s and '60s, he contributed essays and journalistic pieces to The Village Voice, New York Herald Tribune, the Evergreen Review, Commentary, and Commonweal. Krim's best-known book was the 1961 essay collection, Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. With his "naked, introspective" prose style, he was often linked to Beat Generation writers and to New Journalism.
Biography Krim was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. He was orphaned at age ten after his father died of a heart attack and his mother committed suicide. For the next seven years, he was shuttled between relatives' homes. In 1939 he graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, and then attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). He dropped out of UNC after one year and returned to New York City. During World War II, he worked for the Office of War Information, writing news stories.
His journalism career commenced in the summer of 1942 when The New Yorker hired him as a reporter. He worked intermittently for the magazine through 1945, but later publicly criticized it for its "cramped" editorial policy and resistance to new styles of writing.
In a 1960 essay, "Milton Klonsky, My Favorite Intellectual", Krim recounted his friendship, beginning in the late 1940s, with Milton Klonsky, a fellow Greenwich Village writer. Klonsky's self-confident persona as a Jewish intellectual provided a role model for Krim, who admired how Klonsky "didn't seem to operate under the sense of Yiddish shame and inferiority that crippled not only myself but so many of the middle-class Jewish kids who came from roughly my own uptown environment."
In the summer of 1955, Krim suffered a nervous breakdown. He was handcuffed and taken to Bellevue Hospital, and then sent to psychiatric clinics in Westchester and Long Island where he was given electroshock therapy. He wrote about this experience in his 1959 essay, "The Insanity Bit".
Krim said that the arrival of the Beat Generation "liberat[ed] him from the polite constraints" of the "rarefied world of the literary journals" of which he had been a part. Starting with his essay "Anti-Jazz" in The Village Voice in October 1957, Krim's freewheeling prose style became his trademark. He edited an anthology of Beat writing in 1960, and wrote the introduction to Jack Kerouac's novel Desolation Angels (1965).
Krim mainly supported himself with book reviews and literary criticism for publications such as The New York Times Book Review, Commonweal, Commentary, the Partisan Review, and The Hudson Review. He was a consulting editor to the Evergreen Review. In 1965 he joined the New York Herald Tribunes staff. Krim taught writing seminars at a number of universities in the United States and Israel. In the 1970s, he taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and at Columbia University.
His honors included the Longview Award for Literature (1960), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976), and a Fulbright grant (1985).
After suffering health problems in the 1980s, including a severe heart attack in 1986, Krim committed suicide on August 30, 1989, in his one-room apartment on East 10th Street. The cause of death was an overdose of barbiturates. He left notes with instructions for those who would find him.
Posthumous recognition In the years following his death, Krim's work gained greater recognition. In a 1994 collection, The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Phillip Lopate included Krim's essay, "For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business". Lopate later said of Krim: "With the passage of time, Seymour Krim comes to seem more and more unique, essential—a classic American essayist. He still has the ability to shock us with his gutsy honesty and urgency." Quote is from Phillip Lopate's blurb for the book on the dust jacket.
Vivian Gornick, who called Krim "a Jewish Joan Didion," added "Failure Business" to her list of the "Ten Greatest Essays, Ever".
In his 1992 memoir, New York in the Fifties, Dan Wakefield recalled his early impressions of Krim:
In a 1996 review of What's This Cat's Story? The Best of Seymour Krim, literary critic Irving Malin praised Krim's "brilliant, energetic prose rhythms."
In their 2001 volume Editors: The Best from Five Decades, Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford included Krim's essay, "What's This Cat's Story?". In 2010, Mark Cohen edited and wrote an introduction to a comprehensive anthology, Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim.
Bibliography Krim, Seymour, ed. (1954). Manhattan: Stories from the Heart of a Great City. New York: Bantam Books. . ————, ed. (1960). The Beats. A Gold Medal Anthology. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett Publications. . Krim, Seymour (1968) . Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer (New enlarged ed.). New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. . ———— (1970). Shake It for the World, Smartass. New York: Dial Press. . ———— (1974). You & Me: The Continuing One-on-One Odyssey of a Literary Gambler. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. . ————, ed. (1988). NO!ART Pin-Ups, Excrement, Protest, Jew-Art. Berlin: Edition Hundertmark. . Co-edited with Boris Lurie. In German and English. Brooks, Peggy, ed. (1991). What's This Cat's Story? The Best of Seymour Krim. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House. . Cohen, Mark, ed. (2010). Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. .
References
Further reading
External links Seymour Krim Papers at the University of Iowa