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Historical records matching Lionel Abel
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About Lionel Abel
Lionel Abel was born on 28 November 1910 and died on 19 April 2001, in Manhattan, New York and was an eminent Jewish American playwright, essayist and theater critic. He was also a translator, and was an authorized translator of Jean-Paul Sartre, who called Abel the most intelligent man in New York City.
His first success was a tragedy, "Absalom", staged off-Broadway in 1956 and winner of the Obie award. It was followed by three other works of drama, before he turned to criticism. He is best known for coining the term metatheatre in his book of the same title.
He was one of the signers of the Humanist Manifesto.
Born in Brooklyn, Abel was the son of Alter Abelson, a rabbi and poet, and of Anna Schwartz Abelson, a writer of short stories. His brother, Raziel Abelson, is a professor emeritus of philosophy at New York University and he has two sisters.
He graduated from high school at the age of fourteen and moved out of his parents' home when he was fifteen, also shortening his name around this time. He attended St. John’s University in New York from 1926 to 1928, and then transferred to the University of North Carolina which he attended from 1928 to 1929. However, he was expelled for publishing a magazine and never earned a college degree. Afterwards, he moved to Greenwich Village in New York.
In 1939, he married Sherry Goldman, whom he later divorced. In 1970, Abel married Gloria Becker.
Despite never obtaining a college degree, Abel was offered a professor position at the State University of New York at Buffalo because of his writings. After teaching appointments at Columbia and Rutgers Universities and at the Pratt Institute, he concluded his academic career in the English Department of the University at Buffalo, before retiring to New York City.
He is also the author of several important translations from the French, including texts by André Breton and Guillaume Apollinaire. A lively and sometimes cantankerous polemicist, he counted numerous members of his generation's intellectual elite among his friends and sparring partners, including Delmore Schwartz, Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling, James Agee, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Leslie Fiedler and Elizabeth Hardwick.
Abel received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1958, a Longview award in 1960, an award from the National Insitute of Arts and Letters in 1964, and a Rockefeller Foundation grant in 1966. His play "Absalom" won an Obie award as the best play of the 1956 Off-Broadway season and a Show business award.
Dramas:
"The Death of Odysseus" (New York, Amato Theatre, 1953) "Absalom" (New York, Artist's Theatre, 1956) "The Pretender" (New York, Cherry Lane Theatre, 1960) "The Wives" (New York, 1960)
Criticism:
Metatheatre; a new view of dramatic form (1963) Our first serious fascist? (1980) The Intellectual Follies: A Memoir of the Literary Venture in New York and Paris (1984) Sidney Hook's career: (the philosopher in politics) (1985) Important Nonsense (1987) Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatuc Form (2003)
Anthology: Moderns on Tragedy: An Anthology of Modern and Relevant Opinions on the Substance and Meaning of Tragedy (1967)
Translations:
Camille Pissarro: Letters to His Son Lucie
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Lionel Abel's Timeline
| 1910 |
November 28, 1910
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New York, New York County, New York, United States
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| 2001 |
April 19, 2001
Age 90
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New York, New York County, New York, United States
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