1914–1997 · New Yorker writer, drama and architecture critic
Brendan Gill joined The New Yorker in 1936 and stayed for more than sixty years, writing over 1,200 pieces — Profiles, Talk of the Town, and years of Broadway and Off-Broadway reviewing — before serving as the magazine’s principal architecture critic and author of its Skyline column from 1987 to 1996. Away from the desk he was one of New York’s most effective preservationists, joining Jacqueline Kennedy’s coalition to save Grand Central Terminal and chairing both the Municipal Art Society and the New York Landmarks Conservancy. Here at The New Yorker (1975), the memoir that carries this sentence, is the book he is still most quoted from — usually with someone else’s name attached.