John Leonard, 69, a literary and cultural critic who was an early champion of Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez and other authors and who was so consumed and informed by books that Kurt Vonnegut once praised him as “the smartest man who ever lived,” has died.
Leonard died Wednesday at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City of complications from lung cancer, said his stepdaughter, Jen Nessel.
A former union activist and community organizer, Leonard was an emphatic liberal whose career began in the 1960s at the conservative National Review and continued at countless other publications, including The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation and The Atlantic Monthly. He also was a TV critic for New York magazine, a columnist for Newsday and a commentator for “CBS Sunday Morning.”
Leonard had the critic’s most fortunate knack of being ahead of his time. He was the first major reviewer to assess Morrison’s fiction and the first major American critic to write about García Márquez.
As the literary director for radio station KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., Leonard featured the commentary of Pauline Kael, before she became famous as a film critic for The New Yorker. Leonard also was an early advocate of Mary Gordon, Maxine Hong Kingston and other female writers.
Leonard’s own books included “Black Conceit,” “This Pen for Hire” and “Lonesome Rangers: Homeless Minds, Promised Lands, Fugitive Cultures.”
Rosella Hightower, 88, an Oklahoma- born ballerina who became a leading figure in the European dance world and founded a major ballet school in France, died Tuesday at her home in Cannes, France, after a series of strokes.
Hightower, who was of Choctaw descent, was one of five American Indian ballerinas from Oklahoma who received special honors in the state. The most famous was Maria Tallchief, who worked with George Balanchine on such masterpieces as “Firebird” and the Balanchine version of “The Nutcracker.”
Hightower traveled to France in 1937 and eventually became a member of the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where Tallchief also danced for a time.
In 1947, Hightower joined de Cuevas Ballet, named for Chilean-born Marquis George de Cuevas. She also was involved with the Marseilles Ballet, La Scala Ballet and the Paris Opera Ballet.
Hightower opened the Ecole Superieure de Danse de Cannes in 1962, and it became one of Europe’s leading ballet schools.
