was one of America's most distinguished literary naturalists. Irwin Edman once remarked, "Krutch is a sound naturalist in the philosophical rather than the merely botanical and biological sense." He has been equally well known as a teacher, drama critic, biographer, editor, journalist, and public speaker. His 1954 book, The Measure of Man received the National Book Award for non-fiction. Originally pessimistic about the human condition, evidenced by the 1929 publication of The Modern Temper, Krutch eventually regained optimism by discovering Nature and accepting a Pantheist faith, what he called "faith in wildness." Dr. Krutch (his last name rhymes with "pooch," not "crutch") was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. He took his B.A. degree at the University of Tennessee, and his M.A. and Ph.D degrees from Columbia University. He began teaching at Columbia University in 1917. From 1924 until 1950 Dr. Krutch was the drama critic of the Nation. In 1943 he became the Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia. On doctor's orders, in 1950 he had to leave New York and New England for the dry desert air of the Southwest. In the beauty of the Sonoran Desert, he found something worth living for
In addition to his masterpieces of natural history (described below), notably The Voice of the Desert and The Desert Year,(which won the John Burroughs Medal in 1954), Krutch wrote literary biographies of Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Johnson, and Edgar Allen Poe, and on other literary topics, some twenty-one books in all. His book Voice of the Desert was the topic for a television special and film. Dr. Krutch lived his retirement years in Tucson, Arizona, and was a co-founder of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.