Fun Facts Friday: R.P. Blackmur

R.P. Blackmur (21 January, 1904 – 2 February, 1965) was one of America’s foremost critics of literature, and a distinguished professor in Princeton University.

Books by R.P. Blackmur*

1. Richard Palmer Blackmur was born in Springfield, MA.
2. After graduating form the Cambridge, Massachusetts, High and Latin School, Mr. Blackmur worked in a book store and sat in on lectures at Harvard.
3. According to his friend and fellow critic Leon Edel, Mr. Blackmur attended “the school of his own bold intelligence.”
4. As managing editor and regular contributor of The Hound & Horn, a literary quarterly magazine, Mr. Blackmur was partly responsible for making the publication an early and influential little magazine.
5. In 1935 Mr. Blackmur published The Double Agent, his first volume of criticism.
6. His literary reputation was not only based on criticism, but also on the poetry Mr. Blackmur wrote.
7. Mr. Blackmur started teaching creative writing and then English literature at Princeton University in 1940. He would be there for the next 25 years.
8. Even though he was a professor in Princeton, he never held an academic degree.
9. Mr. Blackmur founded Princeton’s Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Christian Gauss was his friend, and a fellow critic.
10. He was the first author to receive the Pitt Professorship of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University, as well as Princeton’s first Hodder Fellow.

Books by R.P. Blackmur*

Zohar – Man of la Book
*Ama­zon links point to an affil­i­ate account