Stanley Crouch
Stanley Crouch’s books include the essay collections Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990) and The All-American Skin Game (1995), both nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Always in Pursuit (1998); The Artificial White Man (2004); Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (2013); and the acclaimed novel Don't the Moon Look Lonesome (2004). He was the recipient of a Windham Campbell Prize, a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Crouch helped found and served as artistic consultant for Jazz at Lincoln Center, and in 2019 was named a Jazz Master for jazz advocacy by the National Endowment for the Arts. He also served as president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. Crouch passed away in 2020.
“From bravura sentence to serpentine paragraph, the book is a virtuoso performance of musical-literary mimesis . . . Kansas City Lightning provides more ideas and better writing in its 365 pages than any other book about Parker.” —David Hajdu, The New York Times Book Review
"Always in Pursuit is everything I love about the brilliant Stanley Crouch. In his hands the essay becomes a great jazz riff on the page—social commentary rightly done as a singular 'I'. Written by a passionately determined believer in the American possibility, this collection of essays is wide ranging, fiercely opinionated, elegantly composed, purposefully challenging. Be prepared." —Marcia Gillespie, Editor-in-Chief, Ms. magazine
“Fearless and exquisitely lyrical . . . Some of the most heady, passionate, soulful, high-flying, blues-tinged prose this side of Leon Forrest . . . It radiates the joy of doing battle for love and music . . . [and] captures the gravity-defying lift of romance more majestically than one previously believed the English language allowed.” —Chicago Tribune [on Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome]
Selected Works
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