Dwight Garner

Who is Dwight Garner?

Dwight Garner is an American journalist, now a literary critic for The New York Times. Prior to that he was senior editor at the New York Times Book Review, where he worked from 1999 to 2009. He was also the founding books editor of Salon.com, where he worked from 1995 to 1998.

His essays and journalism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, the Oxford American, Slate, the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, The Nation, and elsewhere. He has served on the board of the National Book Critic’s Circle. In a January 2011 column for Slate, the journalist Timothy Noah called Garner a "highly gifted critic" who had reinvigorated the New York Times's literary coverage, and likened him to Anatole Broyard and John Leonard.

He is the author of Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements, and he is at work on a biography of James Agee.

Dwight Garner was born in West Virginia and graduated from Middlebury College. He lives in Frenchtown, New Jersey. He is married to the cookbook writer Cree LeFavour.