American literary critics

Marie Arana (born Lima, Peru) is an author, editor, journalist, critic, and the inaugural Literary Director of the Library of Congress.

Lewis MacAdams (October 12, 1944 – April 21, 2020) was an American poet, journalist, political activist, and filmmaker.

Robert James Collas Lowry (March 28, 1919 – December 5, 1994) was an American novelist, short story writer, illustrator, and independent press publisher.
Lowry was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He was a literary wunderkind who began writing at the age of 8; within a year, he had stories published in the Cincinnati Times Star. He graduated from Withrow High School in 1937, after which he entered the University of Cincinnati. He was, according to biographer James Reide, a voracious reader of the literary works of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Guy de Maupassant.

Carolyn See (née Laws; January 13, 1934 – July 13, 2016) was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.

John Gregory Dunne (May 25, 1932 – December 30, 2003) was an American writer. He began his career as a journalist for Time magazine before expanding into writing criticism, essays, novels, and screenplays. He often collaborated with his wife, Joan Didion.

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (November 1, 1917 - June 13, 2002) was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
He was the Neil Gray Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he taught from 1959 until his retirement in 1988; from 1966 to 1972, he was master of Yale's Calhoun College. From 1954 to 1959 he taught at Rutgers–Newark. In 1988 Lewis received a Litt.D. from Bates College. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lewis received its Gold Medal for Biography in 2000.
Lewis is generally considered one of the founders of the academic field of American Studies. His interests ranged from criticism of American and European writers to biography and artistic criticism. He is associated with John William Ward.
Lewis' career as critic involved him in the lives of many influential American and European thinkers and writers.
Lewis received his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Norman Maclean, author of the novel A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. He and his wife and sometime co-author Nancy later became close friends with Southern writer Robert Penn Warren.
Lewis' first major work The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955) explored De Crèvecoeur's idea of the American as a "new man" - an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Lewis portrayed this preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind that shaped the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. The book traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James and others, and in his epilogue Lewis exposes its continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

John Francisco Rechy (born March 10, 1931) is a Mexican-American novelist and essayist. His novels are written extensively about gay culture in Los Angeles and wider America, among other subject matter. City of Night, his debut novel published in 1963, was a best seller. Drawing on his own background, he has contributed to Mexican-American literature, notably with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which has been taught in several Chicano studies courses throughout the United States. But, even after the success of his first novel, he still worked as a prostitute, teaching during the day, and hustling at night. He worked as a prostitute into his forties while also teaching at UCLA. Through the 1970's and 1980's he dealt with personal drug use, as well as the AIDS crisis, which killed many of his friends.