Dwight Garner

Last updated

Dwight Garner
Dwight Garner journalist.jpg
Dwight Garner, book critic at the New York Times since 2008
Born (1965-01-08) January 8, 1965 (age 61)[ citation needed ]
Fairmont, West Virginia, U.S.
OccupationWriter, journalist
Alma mater Middlebury College
Genre Criticism, non-fiction

Dwight Garner (born January 8, 1965) is an American journalist and longtime writer and editor for The New York Times . In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper.

Contents

He is the author of Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany [1] and Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements. [2] In 2023 he published his memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. [3] The book's title refers to the work of the literary critic Seymour Krim, who called his memory "that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine." [4] Writing in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz wrote that "memoir, thoughts about food, and literary criticism are stacked, in The Upstairs Delicatessen, like the bright layers of a Venetian cookie." [5]

Journalism and writing

Garner's previous post at The New York Times was as senior editor of The New York Times Book Review , where he worked from 1999 to 2008. He was a founding editor of Salon.com , [6] where he worked from 1995 to 1998. His monthly column in Esquire magazine [7] was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2017. [8]

His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine , Harper's Magazine , The Times Literary Supplement , the Oxford American , Slate , The Village Voice , the Boston Phoenix , The Nation , [6] and elsewhere. For several years he wrote the program notes for Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series. [9] He has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. In a January 2011 column for Slate, the journalist Timothy Noah called Garner a "highly gifted critic" who had reinvigorated The New York Times's literary coverage, and likened him to Anatole Broyard and John Leonard. [10]

Garner wrote a biweekly column for The New York Times called "American Beauties," which focused on underappreciated American books of the past seventy-five years. [11] His championing of certain titles—including The Complete Novels of Charles Wright [12] and On Fire by Larry Brown [13] —helped return them to print. For Esquire , Garner played in the 2017 World Backgammon Championship in Monaco. [14]

He is a member of New York City's venerable Organ Meat Society, co-founded by the longtime Eater food critic Robert Sietsema. [15] In 2023, Garner's Grub Street Diet, for New York magazine, was one of their most popular pieces of the year. [16] His 2012 New York Times essay in praise of the peanut butter and pickle sandwich, which he called "a thrifty and unacknowledged American classic," went viral internationally. [17] [18] Some readers were disgusted, but Christina Cauterucci, writing in Slate , said that Garner "changed my life, intimately and permanently, with an ode to an object I'd never previously considered with the solemnity it deserves: the peanut butter and pickle sandwich." [19] New York Times Cooking has since published the recipe. [20]

Early life and work

Garner was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, [21] where he grew up until relocating Naples, Florida. He graduated from Middlebury College, where he majored in American literature. [22] While in college, he wrote book criticism for The Village Voice , music and theater criticism for the Vanguard Press, an alternative weekly of Burlington, Vermont, and was a stringer for The New York Times.

After his graduation from college, Garner was a reporter for The Addison Independent . He then became the arts editor of the Vermont Times , a new alternative weekly in Burlington. He also became a contributing editor to the Boston Phoenix. In the 1990s Garner was a columnist for the Hungry Mind Review. After moving to New York City in 1994, he worked for one year as an associate editor at Harper's Bazaar, [23] under the editorship of Liz Tilberis. [24]

Garner lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Cree LeFavour. [25] [26] They have two children.

References

  1. ↑ "Garner's Quotations". Macmillan. Retrieved December 11, 2022.
  2. ↑ "Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements" at Amazon.
  3. ↑ "The Upstairs Delicatessen".
  4. ↑ Carbone, Jessica (2024). "Review: The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading about Eating, and Eating while Reading, by Dwight Garner". Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture. 24 (1): 79–80. doi:10.1525/gfc.2024.24.1.79. ISSN   1529-3262. Archived from the original on September 13, 2024.
  5. ↑ "For a Hungry Book Critic, Every Word Is a Feast". The New Yorker .
  6. 1 2 Author bio Archived October 21, 2012, at the Wayback Machine at HarperCollins
  7. ↑ "Dwight Garner". Esquire.
  8. ↑ "ELLIES 2017 FINALISTS ANNOUNCED". Archived from the original on October 14, 2019.
  9. ↑ Lincoln Center's American Songbook, Lincoln Center.
  10. ↑ Noah, Timothy (January 7, 2011). "I Like Dwight". Slate. Retrieved December 24, 2013.
  11. ↑ "American Beauties" in The New York Times.
  12. ↑ Garner, Dwight (February 23, 2017). "The Pleasures of a Writer Who Was 'Richard Pryor on Paper'". The New York Times.
  13. ↑ Garner, Dwight (June 1, 2017). "On Fire Makes Bad Habits Sound Very Sweet". The New York Times.
  14. ↑ Garner, Dwight (April 3, 2019). "How I Won the War Against Regret Playing Backgammon in Monte Carlo". Esquire.
  15. ↑ Sietsema, Robert (March 19, 2025). "Sheep Spines and Pork Kidneys at Long Island City's Newest Chinese Restaurant". Robert Sietsema's New York. Retrieved February 21, 2026.
  16. ↑ Street, Grub (December 26, 2023). "Grub Street's 20 Most-Read Stories of 2023". Grub Street. Retrieved February 21, 2026.
  17. ↑ Garner, Dwight (October 22, 2012). "Peanut Butter Takes On an Unlikely Best Friend". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved February 21, 2026.
  18. ↑ Fulton, Wil (April 9, 2018). "We Tried the Controversial Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich, and It's Shockingly Good". Thrillist. Retrieved February 21, 2026.
  19. ↑ Cauterucci, Christina (April 24, 2018). "A Paean to PB&P". Slate. ISSN   1091-2339 . Retrieved February 21, 2026.
  20. ↑ "Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich Recipe". NYT Cooking. Retrieved February 21, 2026.
  21. ↑ Garner, Dwight (August 12, 2010). "The Greenbrier Resort Hopes to Preserve Its Past". The New York Times . Retrieved December 24, 2013.
  22. ↑ Podhaizer, Suzanne (January 9, 2008). "Cooking the Books". Seven Days . Retrieved December 24, 2013.
  23. ↑ Garner, Dwight. "Dwight Garner | Harper's Magazine". harpers.org.
  24. ↑ Mooallem, Stephen (October 13, 2017), "The Legend of Liz Tilberis —One of Bazaar's Best", Bazaar.
  25. ↑ "20 More Cookbooks". The New York Times. June 1, 2008. Retrieved December 24, 2013.
  26. ↑ Merkin, Daphne (July 24, 2017). "An Odyssey Through Self-Harm and Out the Other Side". The New York Times.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.