Jonathan Baumbach

Jonathan Baumbach (July 5, 1933 – March 28, 2019) was an American author, academic and film critic.

Life and career Baumbach was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, the son of Ida Helen (née Zackheim), a teacher, and Harold M. Baumbach, a painter and academic. His father's disdain for earning tenure at the University of Iowa and various other schools resulted in him moving every year for the first six years of Jonathan's life "looking for a new place to paint."

He received a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College in 1955. Baumbach also earned an M.F.A. in playwriting from Columbia University in 1956

Having had his third novel rejected 32 times, he and Peter Spielberg founded the author-run publishing house Fiction Collective in 1974; one of the first titles published was Baumbach's Reruns. Later reorganized as FC2, the collective has since published many emerging writers (including Russell Banks and Mark Leyner) and does so currently through the University of Alabama Press. Although he remained a board member, Baumbach's own involvement as writer with FC2 finished when the collective rejected his novel B in 2002; it was ultimately published elsewhere. Following Reruns, he published nine additional novels, several collections of short fiction and his collected film criticism.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Baumbach was film critic for Partisan Review. He twice chaired the National Society of Film Critics. (in two of whose films he had acting roles) and Nico Baumbach, partner of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Annie Baker and an assistant professor of film at Columbia University.

Baumbach died on March 28, 2019, at his home in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The Pavilion of Former Wives (2016)

Nonfiction The Landscape of Nightmare: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (1965) Shots In The Dark: Collected Film Criticism (2017)