David Denby (film critic) encyclopedia topics

Background and education

David Denby grew up in New York City. He received his B.A. from Columbia University in 1965.

Career

Journalism

Denby began his professional life in the early 1970s as an adherent of the film critic Pauline Kael—one of a group of film writers informally, and sometimes derisively, known as "the Paulettes. Denby wrote for The Atlantic and New York magazine before arriving at The New Yorker in the middle 1990s; at present, Denby splits his film duties with Anthony Lane, trading off week-by-week. The schedule allows both writers to explore a broad range of critical topics in the body of the magazine.

Some have suggested that Denby's views are out of sync with a general "critical consensus," an observation which his detractors attribute to deliberate contrarianism.

Books

Denby's Great Books (1996), is a non-fiction account of the Western canon-oriented Core Curriculum at his alma mater, Columbia University. Denby reenrolled after three decades, and the book operates as a kind of double portrait, as well as a sort of great-thinkers brush-up. In The New York Times, the writer Joyce Carol Oates called the book "a lively adventure of the mind," filled with "unqualified enthusiasm.Great Books was a New York Times bestseller.

In 2004, Denby published American Sucker, a sort of "Great Shocks" book: the memoirs details his investment misadventures in the stock market of the silicon boom, along with his own bust years as feldgling divorcée from the writer Cathleen Schine, which had had led to a major reassessment of his life. Allan Sloan in the New York Times called the author "formidably smart," while noting this paradox: "Mr. Denby is even smart enough to realize how paradoxical it is that he not only has a good, prestigious job, but that he is also in a position to make money by relating how he lost money in the stock market.