Wyatt Mason (born 1969) is an American critic, translator, and essayist.
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Mason was raised in Manhattan. He attended The Fieldston School in New York, the University of Pennsylvania, and also studied literature at Columbia University and the University of Paris.
Mason is currently a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic and The New Yorker. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Bennington College and at Bard College where he is Senior Fellow at The Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking for 2010-2011.
In 2005, Mason received the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. The NBCC judges called Mason "a critic of unrelenting energy and tough standards. He has exposed scholarly plagiarism, rescued dismissed writers from ignorance and oblivion, smartly scolded faddish novelists...and argued that many of us continue to confuse substance and surface in contemporary writers' work. Masterful at placing writers in dialogue with other writers...he always makes a case for new books he wants people to appreciate, embrace and struggle with." [1]
Mason also won the National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism in 2006, the judges stating: "At once compassionate and ruthless, Wyatt Mason seeks an understanding of his subject with endless erudition and a singular, tireless focus on quality. His criticism moves from the specific to bigger game – a defense of modernism and originality – and he’s not afraid to confront the authors with his findings.” [2]
In May 2008 Mason began to write the blog "Sentences" for Harper's Magazine online. He ceased writing the blog in May 2009.