John,

Loved your work. So sorry smoking robbed us of so much more.

I searched in vain the other day trying to find any of his old CBS Sunday Morning bits and came up with nothing. Are there any video bits of him out there anywhere? That is if anyone is still glancing at the letters here?

I used to so love his bits on Sunday Morning, even when I didn't have a clue who the authors were he was referencing because he was just bursting to tell us about things, that explosive, couldn't hardly stop for a breath cadence of his- gosh I missed it.

I'd like to see just one more bit of him doing that.

I mostly knew John Leonard via his reviews on "Sunday Morning." He brought a dose of intellectual vinegar to that folksy show.

I still have a video tape of the segment he did on Cyberpunk fiction, broadcast back when the Internet and Web were still mysterious things. I should really get around to digitizing that.

I'm so glad he got to vote, and hope he saw the results come in.

We lost two great ones, and I'll miss them both. As will so many of us who cherished the printed word and its power to make us think.

I was very disappointed that Salon did not do a Terkel obit. I realize that the election news was paramount, so his death got a bit lost in the shuffle. (He didn't even get his "props" in the weekly news magazines!) But now the election is over, we can start resuming "normal life" again (at least until the holiday rush), and do our proper mourning for these national treasures.

I knew John a little bit at Harvard, where he wrote outstanding reviews for the Crimson. He was a year or two behind me, I think (as was Peter Benchley, who also died too young). One summer, a friend of mine and I put out a small, mimeographed literary magazine that was sold primarily at Harvard locations and did fairly well (at least, we got our money back). One reason for its relative success was a very kind review from John Leonard. He called it, I believe, "a refreshing popsicle in the long, hot summer of student literature." I thought it was praise at the time; now I'm not so sure.

But that led me to introduce myself and I found him to be a very charming guy. I'm sorry that our acquaintance didn't extend beyond Harvard.

...that intellect, that keen eye, that subtle vision, that quiet, steady hand, leading one through dark wildernesses and broad vistas of others' thoughts; "genius" seems trite.

What a sad day to note the passing of critic John Leonard, and what a delight to read Laura Miller's description of the good critic's prose style as "cascades". Indeed, it was his style that brought me to Leonard, the way his sentences would knowingly roam from nominal book or television reviews and would turn into parsings, investigations , deconstructions and re-assemblages of embedded in a given narrative.

Leonard's value as a critic was that he was able to sift through the generic structure of pop culture and find the motivating idea that fired up a writer's passion and informed his cadences, and he was aware as well of how the problematic nature of the venturing hero not just contending with foes and countervailing forces, but with his own vanity and doubt, elements likely as not to distract him and produce an an agonizing, satisfying drama.

He was a master of grasping what novelists were getting at--his writings on DeLillo, particularly his long piece on Underworld gathered in the essay collection When The Kissing Had to Stop , skips the postmodernist lexicon of murk and defeated deferment and instead clearly, precisely, effectively articulates DeLillo's theme and investigation of characters desiring a concrete cosmology and metaphysical certainty who yet have the dreaded sensations that everything they know is shifting, changing in quality , that their storylines now contain voices they cannot understand. Leonard, a poet himself, is among the few who went beyond the typical praise for DeLillo's prose and instead got to the poetry of it; he got to the concentric of DeLillo's fictions.

Don DeLillo benefited greatly by having a reader as probing and brilliant as Leonard, as did the readers of his reviews. I am sad this master of the critical craft is now silent.

Ah, this is sad. I corresponded and met with him back in his days at the NYTIMES. He never ran one of my reviews, but he was so sweet about it I never thought to get pissed at him.

I liked how he made a distinction between writers and academic writers and preferred the former. It mattered more to him what you wrote than your "credentials." His version of the book review was immanently more readable and exciting as a result--and the same was true for his own reviews where he was able to bring in himself, and a real world in a way that still reflected on the material under review. (Harvey Shapiro shared this with him.)

Today I hardly ever read the NYBOOK REVIEW, though I get it every week. Nobody takes any chances or risks; it's been "sanitized" into a production line for robots. You've got to read "between" the lines to actually gather whether or not a book is any good--or then read a review elsewhere to find out if you want to take the next step.

It's that kind of homogenization that takes over when committees and corporate minds rule--and it doesn't look like there will ever be a return to the days of John Leonard because there will never be another like him.

Just this since I already wrote about him:

http://bestiaire.typepad.com/moreau/2008/11/john-leonard-rip.html

I'm so sad to hear this news. In college in the 70's, I used to read religously his Private Lives column in the Times on Wednesdays, and tape it to my dorm room door. He was a beautiful, funny writer about small, intimate things and his musings on the business of living helped me grow up. He had a gift for precise quotation, be it from Bierce or Camus. If any of you are not familiar w/those essays, track down "Private Lives in the Imperial City" on Powells or Alibris. My heart goes out to Andrew and the rest of his family. I'm glad to hear that he lived to hear of Obama's election. This is a great loss to all of us.