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 John’s greatest passion was for music. He

had an impressive command of the classical repertory, and,

we are told, an equally impressive command of jazz. Indeed,

John did not discriminate among genres: only between good

music and bad, the excellent and the false, sentimental, or

poorly executed.

In order to distinguish himself from another writer named

John Coleman, our John Coleman wrote under the

name Alexander Coleman. He published on a wide variety of

subjects literary and musical. For The New Criterion, he

wrote delightfully erudite pieces on such neglected figures

as the Portuguese novelist and man of letters Eça de

Queirós, an abundance of music criticism, and incisive

reports on the cultural situation in the

(invariably balmy) places his inveterate travels took him.

Farewell, Maestro.