Naomi Gordon Lebowitz (born February 6, 1932) is a literary philosopher, author, critic, and scholar of American, English, Scandinavian, and continental European literature, as well as a translator of Danish fiction.
Her seven book-length critical studies of authors and thinkers have focused on the difficulties of spiritual and religious passion in the face of modern belief systems. Lebowitz's studies were sometimes eclipsed by the concentration of American academics on deconstructionist theory during the latter decades of the twentieth-century. More recent approaches that value intersectionality and historicism, however, have validated her importance as a scholar, critic, and philosopher.
Lebowitz's acclaimed translation of the Nobel-Prize winning Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan's 1917 novel (English: Lucky Per) was published in 2010. In Lebowitz's "fluent and lucid version", Lucky Per was hailed by James Wood in The New Yorker as a "shattering, sometimes unbearably powerful novel". The first translation into English of the novel, it was republished by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019 in an Everyman's Library edition.
Early years and education
Lebowitz was born Naomi Gordon in St. Louis, Missouri, on February 6, 1932. Her parents were Rabbi Julius Gordon and Mildred (Dubin) Gordon, a teacher. Both parents had Orthodox Jewish forebears. Her father served Shaare Emeth, one of the leading Reform congregations in the United States, guiding it through the Great Depression, World War II, and a move from St. Louis's Central West End to the suburb of University City. Lebowitz's twin sister, Ruth, would also become a critic and scholar.
Lebowitz earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College after studying for a year at the Sorbonne. She returned to St. Louis and in 1953 married Harvard Law School graduate and U. S. Army Air Corps veteran Albert Lebowitz, who was ten years her senior, the son of a St. Louis tailor with extended family from Poland and Russia. She then enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis to earn an M.A. in Romance languages (with a thesis about critical reactions to the poetry of Lautréamont) in 1955, followed by a Ph.D. in English literature in 1962 with a dissertation about Henry James entitled "Henry James and the Moral Imperative of Relationship".
Academic and teaching career
Lebowitz joined the faculties of the Washington University English and Comparative Literature Departments in 1962, and was honored by the student body for excellence in teaching in 1968. She was the first woman in the English Department to be paid the same salary as male colleagues with comparable credentials. Lebowitz rarely taught the same books more than once and reveled in designing creative syllabi that juxtaposed writers from different traditions in dialogues to be mediated by her student readers. A typical, one-of-a-kind graduate seminar, offered in 1976, brought together six authors writing in four languages under the title "James's Balzac, Conrad's Flaubert, and Kafka's Svevo."
Representative of appreciative students over the years was her dissertation advisee Brian Walter, who noted in 2012 that Lebowitz actually designed two new courses each semester — which covered "the full historical, philosophical and cross-cultural foundations of modern narrative." In her books too Lebowitz approached her literary subjects as figures in a constellation of human endeavor that she arranged to create dialectical discussion. Her wide-ranging scholarly studies frequently reference the work of sixteenth-century philosopher and essayist Michel de Montaigne. In 1989, Professor Lebowitz was named Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Scholar in the Humanities by Washington University, a position she held until her retirement 11 years later.
Professor emerita and active retirement
In 2000, Lebowitz retired as professor emerita. Remaining active and productive in her retirement, she published a substantial critical article in Scandanavian Studies in 2006. In 2010, at age 78, she completed and saw published what would become an acclaimed translation of the internationally respected eight-volume Danish novel Lucky Per, first published by Nobel Prize winner Henrik Pontoppidan in 1904. (Her translation would be republished nine years later in Knopf's Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics series.) In 2012 the university honored her with a Distinguished Alumni Award. Following the death of Albert Lebowitz in 2016, she continued to study and write at her home in University City, Missouri. The Albert and Naomi Lebowitz Papers, 1962–1996 are held by the Special Collections Library at Washington University in St. Louis.