Jonathan Baumbach

Jonathan Baumbach (July 5, 1933 – March 28, 2019) was an American author, academic and film critic. Baumbach was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the son of Ida Helen (née Zackheim), a teacher, and Harold M. Baumbach, a painter and academic. His father's disdain for earning tenure at the University of Iowa and various other schools resulted in him moving every year for the first six years of Jonathan's life "looking for a new place to paint." He received a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College in 1955. Baumbach also earned an M.F.A. in playwriting from Columbia University in 1956 and a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1961. Following two years of service in the United States Army, from 1956 to 1958, he was an instructor of English at Stanford (1958–1960) before holding assistant professorships at Ohio State University (1961–1964) and New York University (1964–1966). He returned to Brooklyn College as an associate professor in 1966 and was promoted to full professor in 1969. From 1975 to 2001, he was director of the college's M.F.A. fiction program. He also held visiting professorships at the University of Washington (1979–1980), Princeton University (1990–1991) and Brown University (1994). During the late 1950s, he was a contributor to Film Culture magazine before publishing two novels and a monograph on American fiction in the 1960s.