A short life of the author
Joseph Wood Krutch (25 November 1893 – 22 May 1970) was an American critic, naturalist, and essayist who lived two intellectual lives. In the first, as drama critic of The Nation and professor at Columbia University, he wrote The Modern Temper (1929), one of the most eloquent and despairing analyses of what modernity had done to the human spirit. In the second, after retreating to the Arizona desert at age fifty-eight, he wrote a series of nature books — The Desert Year, The Voice of the Desert, The Great Chain of Life — that constitute one of the finest bodies of American nature writing. The journey from New York pessimism to Sonoran reverence is one of the most remarkable intellectual conversions in American letters.
Early Career: Critic and Scholar
Krutch was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, studied at the University of Tennessee and Columbia University, and joined Columbia’s English faculty in 1925. He served as drama critic of The Nation from 1924 to 1952 — a remarkably long tenure that made him one of the most influential theatre critics in American journalism.
His critical books include Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926), a Freudian-influenced biography that was controversial in its day, and Samuel Johnson (1944), a warmly sympathetic biography that won the National Book Award and remains one of the best introductions to Johnson’s life and character. His Henry David Thoreau (1948) is a thoughtful literary biography that anticipated the Thoreau revival of the 1960s.
The Modern Temper (1929)
Krutch’s most famous — and most despairing — book argues that modern science and philosophy have destroyed the metaphysical foundations on which human happiness and meaning depended. The universe revealed by science is indifferent to human values; love is reduced to biochemistry, morality to social convention, tragedy to neurosis. Humanity has lost the capacity for the grand emotions — love, heroism, religious faith — because it can no longer believe in the frameworks that gave those emotions meaning.
The book is beautifully written and intellectually devastating. It was praised by H. L. Mencken, T. S. Eliot, and other critics, and it remains one of the most honest statements of the secular intellectual’s predicament. It is also, by Krutch’s own later admission, profoundly wrong — or at least profoundly incomplete.
The Desert Conversion
In 1950, Krutch retired from Columbia and moved to Tucson, Arizona. He had been an amateur naturalist for years, and the move to the desert transformed his intellectual life. Confronted with the astonishing diversity and resilience of desert life — the saguaro cactus, the Gila monster, the roadrunner, the intricate ecology of the Sonoran landscape — he found what modernity had supposedly destroyed: a sense of wonder, meaning, and moral order rooted not in metaphysics but in the natural world.
The Desert Year (1952)
Krutch’s first desert book is an account of a year observing the Sonoran landscape, its seasons, its flora, and its fauna. It combines precise natural observation with philosophical reflection on the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world. The prose is lucid and unhurried, and the book’s argument — that attention to nature can restore the sense of meaning that the modern temper had declared lost — is made through accumulated observation rather than abstract assertion.
The Voice of the Desert (1955)
A companion volume that deepens the themes of The Desert Year, exploring the ethical implications of humanity’s relationship to nature. Krutch argues that the capacity to appreciate the intrinsic value of other living things — not merely their utility — is the foundation of a genuinely moral consciousness. The book anticipates the environmental ethics movement by decades.
The Great Chain of Life (1956)
Krutch’s most philosophically ambitious nature book explores consciousness across the spectrum of living things — from plants to insects to mammals — and argues against the mechanistic reductionism that treats all behaviour as mere stimulus-response. He insists that consciousness, in some form, extends far more widely through the natural world than scientific materialism acknowledges.
The Measure of Man (1954)
This book represents Krutch’s explicit repudiation of The Modern Temper. He argues that the despair of his earlier work was based on a false premise — that scientific reductionism is the only valid way of understanding human experience. The Measure of Man contends that human beings are not merely biological machines but beings with genuine freedom, consciousness, and the capacity for values that cannot be reduced to neurology or evolutionary adaptation.
Critical Standing
Krutch’s literary criticism is little read today, but his nature writing has grown in reputation. The Desert Year and The Voice of the Desert are now recognised as essential works in the tradition that runs from Thoreau through John Muir, Aldo Leopold, and Rachel Carson to Edward Abbey and Barry Lopez. Krutch’s particular contribution was his insistence that nature writing could be philosophical without being academic — that observation and reflection were inseparable activities.
Collecting Krutch
The Modern Temper (1929, Harcourt, Brace) in first edition brings $50–$100. The Desert Year (1952, William Sloane) and The Voice of the Desert (1955, William Sloane) are affordable and worth seeking out in their original editions. Samuel Johnson (1944, Henry Holt) is common. Krutch is undervalued by collectors, making his first editions excellent acquisitions.