Seymour Krim

Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, a collection of essays by Seymour Krim, appeared in 1961 with a foreword by Norman Mailer, won high praise from James Baldwin, became a period classic and then dropped from sight.

What's in it? The cover says it all. To the left of a photo of Krim, kneeling behind a cannon and dressed in the hip formality of the day with suit jacket and tie, short hair, and glasses with black frames sturdy enough to jack up a car, are the words Sex Suicide Homosexuality Sportswriting Jews Negroes Jazz Genius Insanity New York: The Literary and Lower Depths.

What a grab bag. I bought my copy from a tattered street vendor on Broadway and 113th who stood guard over a dozen old books displayed on a lopsided card table.

I read Krim's "Making It!" piece on the downtown number 1 train--the ideal spot in which to soak up his gleeful blowtorching of the celebrity culture that he was early to see exploding around him in the art-tinged and money-mad world of infinite New York. His writing was angry but he wasn't a scold. He was titillated even as he held his nose. And he wrote exciting untrammeled wised-up city talk as good as that found in the mouths of Saul Bellow's tough guys.

Krim articles

"Missing a Beat: The Jewish Writings of Seymour Krim." Zeek, A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (September 2007) Read Article

This article is the first to celebrate Krim's honest and outrageous articles on the Jewish themes that obsessed him: post-Holocaust anger, the lack of a nourishing Jewish culture, assimilation and emasculation, and the ugliness of self-hatred.

"Seymour Krim." Biographical entry in Encyclopedia of Jewish American Literature (forthcoming, November 2007).