1901–1988 · French-born literary scholar; Sterling Professor of French at Yale, 1938–1969
Henri Maurice Peyre was a French-born American scholar of literature who held Yale’s Sterling Professorship of French from 1938 until 1969, making him one of the most influential interpreters of French writing in the English-speaking world. Writers and Their Critics: A Study of Misunderstanding (1944) is his argument about why authors and critics talk past one another — and the chewing-gum line is not a thesis in it but a throwaway aside, buried in a section headed “Toward a Reconciliation,” complaining that mass entertainment had gone soft in the mouths of people who once read Shakespeare. He was writing about movies and radio. Television, in 1944, was barely a product.