William A. Henry III | |
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Born | 1950 |
Died | 1994 (aged 43–44) |
Education | Yale University ( BA) |
Occupation | Cultural critic |
William Alfred Henry III (1950–1994) was an American cultural critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Henry lived in North Plainfield, New Jersey as a young man. He graduated from Yale in 1971 and began his career in journalism in Boston, writing for the Boston Globe. His coverage of school desegregation in Boston won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He also wrote on the arts for the Globe, winning a second Pulitzer for his television criticism in 1980. [1]
In the 1980s he worked as an arts critic for Time magazine, while pursuing his interests in cultural criticism and in American politics. Among his articles for Time was a story critical of the Hollywood trade newspapers in their cozy relationship in an industry town. [2] In 1984, he wrote Visions of America, an account of the American presidential campaign of that year. His 1990 video documentary of Bob Fosse, Steam Heat, won an Emmy.[ citation needed] He also wrote a 1992 biography of Jackie Gleason, The Great One. [3] [4]
His final book was In Defense of Elitism, a work of social and cultural criticism that argued that societies and cultures might be ranked on a spectrum ranging from 'egalitarianism' to 'elitism', and that the contemporary United States had moved too far away from the latter; a view he defended with reference to college education, multiculturalism, and other topics. He died of a heart attack on June 28, 1994, while the book was coming to press. [5]