Gilbert Seldes
Seldes served as the editor and drama critic of the seminal modernist magazine The Dial and hosted the NBC television program The Subject is Jazz (1958).
Later, he made films, wrote radio scripts and became the first director of television for CBS News and the founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
"[2] Gilbert Seldes was born on January 3, 1893, in Alliance, New Jersey, and attended a small elementary school in the 300-home farm community.
[3] Both Gilbert's parents were Russian Jewish immigrants, and his mother, Anna Saphro, died in 1896 when he and his older brother, famed war correspondent and journalist George Seldes, were still young.
[3] Gilbert's father, George Sergius Seldes, a strongly opinionated and radically philosophical man, affected every aspect of his young sons' lives.
[4] Seldes attended Philadelphia's Central High School and then enrolled in Harvard, concentrating on English Studies and graduating in 1914.
In the 1920s, he rejected conventional understandings of jazz, film, comics, vaudeville and Broadway as banal, immoral and aesthetically questionable.
[13] Unlike his contemporaries, therefore, he evaluated popular culture, introducing new sources like jazz, comics, film, television and radio to criticism.
[16] In The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes stated that the language and rhythms of jazz reflected a distinct, home-grown American identity.
[19] More importantly, he also objected to these expatriates' and critics' assertion that America had insufficient historical experience to inspire artistic creativity.
[27] Media responsibility was also a pertinent issue to Seldes, as he believed that entertainment corporations' control and commercialization of the arts eroded the value of popular culture.
[33] In early 1946, Seldes wrote an essay in Esquire magazine, where he criticized what he perceived to be the prevailing radio humor of the time.
Despite his objections to radio comedy, Seldes did enjoy appearing on the show, and recalled that Benny's writers "accomplished the miracle of making me seem very funny indeed".
The only one that seems even faintly valid to myself is that I wasn't, by nature, a joiner of movements… In a sense, this absorption into a life I had never anticipated and the prosperity I enjoyed, could make me indifferent to public causes.
Following his graduation from Harvard University in 1914, Seldes left for London as the Philadelphia Evening Ledger's correspondent during World War I.
Seldes would become second associate editor for The Dial in 1920, often contributing how own pieces to the periodical under the pseudonyms Vivian Shaw or Sebastien Cauliflower.
[41] His long, glowing 1922 review in The Nation of Ulysses by James Joyce helped the book become known in the United States (although it would remain banned there until 1933).
[42] Seldes' tenure as editor of The Dial included the publication of the famous November 1922 issue featuring T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.
[43] During this time, he worked with other intellectuals like Marianne Moore and Sophia Wittenberg (who later became Lewis Mumford's wife), who recounted him as an excellent colleague – Gilbert was lighthearted and easy to get along with.
Though he was serious about his work, which he seemed to enjoy, I would not say he was intellectually intense… The Dial in its early days, and I was there in one capacity or another from the start, was conducted in the office along rather informal lines with a general camaraderie, and Gilbert did much to foster that.
In a letter to his brother George Seldes, he stated that – The purpose of this voyage is a four months trip of rest, frivolity, and impressions to be followed… for solitude to be spent in writing a couple of books.
He returned to New York the following year to write for several journals and newspapers, of which his weekly column for the Saturday Evening Post provided the most significant remuneration.
He wrote, produced and directed mostly educational programs for the small screen and for radio, covering topics on American history and culture.
[54] He would reiterate all his life that his intention was to treat popular (and denigrated) culture with the intelligent criticism that contemporary critics were largely inclined only to apply to highbrow culture; in 1922, his initial list of oft-ignored genres were "Slapstick Moving Pictures, Comic Strips, Revues, Musical Comedy, Columns, Slang Humor, Popular Songs, Vaudeville".
Seldes consistently advocated fair and responsible reporting, and criticized Murrow's intention to disprove McCarthy's credibility.
[61] He also regularly panned F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, save for his most famous novel, The Great Gatsby, which he praised in the August 1925 issue of The Dial.
[62] In his later years, Seldes suffered from ill health, poor memory, and emotional distress, which prevented him from completing his memoirs.
As author, critic, editor, producer, director and educator, his impact was farther reaching than mere periodical circulation or television time-slot.
Leo Mishkin, a critic for New York's The Morning Telegraph, described Seldes' impact: He was my teacher as he was also for thousands of other just coming of age back in the mid-1920s.
Not in the sense of standing up in front of a classroom and lecturing, or correcting examinations…But outside of school one of the requirements we all had was to read The Dial ... and when The Seven Lively Arts was published in 1924 we knew instinctively that a new age, a new appreciation of the arts, indeed a new horizon had opened up for us all...(His enthusiasms) will endure as long as the mass of American look for relaxation and rewards in the mass entertainment media.
