“Each generation has a moment, or an embodiment, of hard-earned integrity and the keenest insight. Among our generation of writers, Stanley Crouch is that moment.”
—Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Essayist, social observer, and all around pundit Stanley Crouch has died in a Bronx hospital at 74, his wife, sculptor Gloria Nixon Crouch reported. The official cause was COVID-19, although he’d been ill for more than a decade.
Crouch was born in South Los Angeles (Dec. 14, 1945) to an absentee heroin addict and hustler, and a domestic maid who encouraged his literary pursuits and the idiom he most embraced, American Jazz.
Driven to militancy by the 1965 Watts Rebellion/Riots, he later denounced Black Nationalism. Although he attended East Los Angeles and Southwest Community Colleges, he never received a degree, but secured tenure as a faculty member at the highly selective Claremont Colleges, joining the Pomona College Faculty at the age of 22.
By 1975, Crouch left for New York City to write for Downbeat, The Village Voice, Vogue, and The New York Times among others. A prolific author, he penned “Notes of a Hanging Judge” (1990), “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing” (2000), and the 2013 biography “Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker.”
His accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Foundation “genius award.”
Aside from his wife he is survived by a daughter and granddaughter.
