George Steiner, a literary polymath and man of letters whose voluminous criticism often dealt with the paradox of literature\u2019s moral power and its impotence in the face of an event like the Holocaust, died on Monday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 90.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his son, Dr. David Steiner.<\/p>\n
An essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic \u2014 he succeeded Edmund Wilson as senior book reviewer for The New Yorker from 1966 until 1997 \u2014 Mr. Steiner both dazzled and dismayed his readers with the range and occasional obscurity of his literary references.<\/p>\n
Essential to his views, as he avowed in \u201cGrammars of Creation,\u201d a book based on the Gifford Lectures<\/a> he delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1990, \u201cis my astonishment, na\u00efve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate.\u201d<\/p>\n Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n George Steiner, the essayist, fiction writer, teacher, scholar and literary critic, has died at 90: https:\/\/t.co\/HJXFxCYDim<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) February 3, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n