Always in Pursuit

  As a cultural and political commentator, Stanley Crouch in unapologetically contentious and delightfully iconoclastic. Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done by the Oklahoma City bombing, Crouch's high-velocity exchange with American culture is conducted with scrupulous allegiance to the truth, even when it hurts—and it usually does. And on the subject of jazz—from Sidney Bechet to Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington to Miles Davis—there is no one more articulate, impassioned, and encyclopedic in his knowledge than Stanley Crouch.

   Crouch approaches everything in his path with head-on energy, restless intelligence, and a refreshing faith in the collective experiment that is America—and he does so in a virtuosic prose style that is never less than thrilling.

"Crouch [is] a master of the provocative sentence and vivid image."-USA Today

"Feisty and varied...beautifully written...Crouch gives us much to think about and says things about this country that need to be said."- Houston Chronicle

"Among contemporary essayists, few match Stanley Crouch for breath of subject matter, diversity of style and sheer brilliance."- Emerge

"Tremendous... one of the greatest nonfiction pens in modern American writing... The ambition, lyricism, rhythm, and breadth of knowledge evidence in his paragraphs can be brilliant."- The Village Voice

Stanley Crouch is a contributing editor to The New Republic, a Sunday columnist for the New York Daily News, and a frequent panelist on The Charlie Rose Show. He is the author of The All-American Skin Game (which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award) and Notes of a Hanging Judge. For years a jazz critic and staff writer for the Village Voice, he is Artistic Consultant to Jazz at Lincoln Center. He lives in New York City.