| Dwight Garner | |
| Birth Date: | 8 January 1965 |
| Birth Place: | Fairmont, West Virginia, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Writer, journalist |
| Genre: | Criticism, non-fiction |
| Alma Mater: | Middlebury College |
Dwight Garner (born January 8, 1965) is an American journalist and longtime writer and editor for The New York Times. In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper.
He is the author of Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany[1] and Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements.[2] In 2023 he published his memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.[3] The book's title refers to the work of the literary critic Seymour Krim, who called his memory "that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine."[4] Writing in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz wrote that "memoir, thoughts about food, and literary criticism are stacked, in The Upstairs Delicatessen, like the bright layers of a Venetian cookie."[5]
Garner's previous post at The New York Times was as senior editor of The New York Times Book Review, where he worked from 1999 to 2008. He was a founding editor of Salon.com,[6] where he worked from 1995 to 1998. His monthly column in Esquire magazine[7] was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in 2017.[8]
His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, the Oxford American, Slate, The Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, The Nation, and elsewhere. For several years he wrote the program notes for Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series.[9] He has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. In a January 2011 column for Slate, the journalist Timothy Noah called Garner a "highly gifted critic" who had reinvigorated The New York Timess literary coverage, and likened him to Anatole Broyard and John Leonard.[10]
Garner wrote a biweekly column for The New York Times called "American Beauties," which focused on underappreciated American books of the past seventy-five years.[11] His championing of certain titles—including The Complete Novels of Charles Wright[12] and On Fire by Larry Brown[13] —helped return them to print. For Esquire, Garner played in the 2017 World Backgammon Championship in Monaco.[14]
He is a member of New York City's venerable Organ Meat Society, co-founded by the longtime Eater food critic Robert Sietsema.[15] In 2023, Garner's Grub Street Diet, for New York magazine, was one of their most popular pieces of the year.[16] His 2012 New York Times essay in praise of the peanut butter and pickle sandwich, which he called "a thrifty and unacknowledged American classic," went viral internationally.[17] [18] Some readers were disgusted, but Christina Cauterucci, writing in Slate, said that Garner "changed my life, intimately and permanently, with an ode to an object I'd never previously considered with the solemnity it deserves: the peanut butter and pickle sandwich."[19] New York Times Cooking has since published the recipe.[20]
Garner was born in Fairmont, West Virginia,[21] where he grew up until relocating Naples, Florida. He graduated from Middlebury College, where he majored in American literature.[22] While in college, he wrote book criticism for The Village Voice, music and theater criticism for the Vanguard Press, an alternative weekly of Burlington, Vermont, and was a stringer for The New York Times.
After his graduation from college, Garner was a reporter for The Addison Independent. He then became the arts editor of the Vermont Times, a new alternative weekly in Burlington. He also became a contributing editor to the Boston Phoenix. In the 1990s Garner was a columnist for the Hungry Mind Review. After moving to New York City in 1994, he worked for one year as an associate editor at Harper's Bazaar,[23] under the editorship of Liz Tilberis.[24]
Garner lives in New York City with his wife, the writer Cree LeFavour.[25] [26] They have two children.
