Richard Locke (September 17, 1941 - August 25, 2023) [1] was an American critic and essayist.
He was a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts and formerly served as the first editor-in-chief of the revived Vanity Fair and president of the National Book Critics Circle.
[5] He was also a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, where he worked as assistant to Robert Gottlieb, deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review,[6] the first editor in chief of the relaunched Vanity Fair (1983),[7] a lecturer at the English Institute, Harvard University, and a Poynter Fellow at Yale University.
He served as a judge of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize Jury in Criticism, and as a director and president of The National Book Critics Circle.
His book Critical Children: The Use of Children in Ten Great Novels, an examination of works by British and American writers from Dickens to Philip Roth that use children as vehicles of moral and cultural interrogation, was published in September 2011 by Columbia University Press.