Stanley Edgar Hyman

Stanley Edgar Hyman (1919–1970) was a literary critic who wrote primarily about critical methods: the distinct strategies critics use in approaching literary texts. Though most likely to be remembered today as the husband of writer Shirley Jackson, he was influential for the development of literary theory in the 1940s and 1950s. Equally skeptical of every major critical methodology of his time, he worked out an early instance of a critical theory, exploring ways that critics can be foiled by their own methods. "Each critic," Hyman wrote in The Armed Vision, "tends to have a master metaphor or series of metaphors in terms of which he sees the critical function. . . this metaphor then shapes, informs, and sometimes limits his work." Hyman saw it as his own critical task to point out these overriding themes by which, tacitly, other critics organized their work and their thinking.

Hyman was born in Brooklyn, New York and graduated from Syracuse University in 1940, where he met Jackson. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker for much of his life, and although he did not possess a graduate degree, taught at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. From 1961 to 1965, Hyman was the literary critic of The New Leader. After Jackson's death in 1965 (both she and Hyman died relatively young), he married Phoebe Pettingell, who later edited a posthumous volume of his work.

Mr. Hyman was also a noted jazz critic, having written hundreds of essays on the subject in addition to his career as a writer and teacher.

Books

• The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. New York: Knopf, 1947.
• Poetry and Criticism: Five Revolutions in Literary Taste. New York: Atheneum, 1961.
• The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer and Freud as Imaginative Writers. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
• The Critic's Credentials: Essays and Reviews. Ed. Phoebe Pettingell. New York: Atheneum, 1978.