It is with great sadness that we report that John Coleman, a long-time contributor to The New Criterion and a close friend of the editors, died on June 17. He was 67 and had been battling cancer for over a year. We met John in the early 1990s at a monthly seminar on modernism sponsored jointly by The New Criterion and New York University, where John taught Spanish literature from “forever” (as he said) until his (early and eagerly sought) retirement in 1997.

From the start, it was clear that John was a man of rare wit, capacious learning, and eager if gently ironical curiosity. At those seminars, John displayed his easy mastery of literature—not just Spanish and Latin American literature, but the entire modernist tradition. He was an expert in Borges (whose work he translated, edited, and expounded), and had a deep grasp of Eliot, Henry James, Stevens, Santayana, and many other figures. But it soon became clear that ...

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