William A. Henry III

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William A. Henry III (1950-1994) was an American cultural critic and author.

Henry lived in Boston as a young man and began his career in journalism in that city, writing for the Boston Globe. His coverage of school desegregation in Boston won a (shared) Pulitzer Prize in 1975. He also wrote on the arts for the Globe, winning a second Pulitzer for his television criticism in 1980.^[1]

In the 1980s he worked as an arts critic for Time magazine, while pursuing his interests in cultural criticism and in American politics. Among his notable works were his 1984 book, Visions of America, on the American presidential campaign of that year; his 1990 video documentary of Bob Fosse, Steam Heat, which won an Emmy; and his 1992 (print) biography of Jackie Gleason, The Great One.^[2]

His final, and perhaps most notable, book was In Defense of Elitism, a work of social and cultural criticism that argued that societies and cultures might be ranked on a spectrum ranging from 'egalitarianism' to 'elitism', and that the contemporary United States had moved too far away from the latter; a view he defended with reference to college education, multiculturalism, and other topics. He died of a heart attack on June 28, 1994, while the book was coming to press.^[3]

After his death, there was a mini-scandal when actor Sir Ian McKellen "outed" Henry's same-sex liaisons.^{[citation needed]} Henry's widow publicly retorted that McKellen could hardly claim to "out" behavior that Henry himself had been totally out about, going so far as to write an article on "outing" for Time in January of 1990.^[4] She made it clear that Henry was genuinely married, and that she'd been quite happy with him ... he just had "enormous appetites".

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