Lionel Abel

From Philosopedia

Abel, Lionel (1910 - 19 April 2001)

Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Abel was the son of Alter Abelson, a rabbi and poet, and of Anna Schwartz Abelson, a writer of short stories.

He never attained a bachelor's degree, but in the early 1960s his writings earned him the offer of a professorship of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught until around 1980, at which time he became a professor emeritus, said his brother, Raziel Abelson of Manhattan, a professor emeritus of philosophy at New York University.

His New York Times obituary by Lawrence Van Gelder included the following:

• Mr. Abel, who shortened his name when he left home as a teenager to write and translate (Rimbaud, among others) in the intellectual milieu of Greenwich Village, was part of a circle that included Irving Howe, Nathan Glaser and Daniel Bell.

• As an Obie award-winning playwright Mr. Abel was perhaps best known for Absalom, one of his four works produced off Broadway. Telling of the aging King David's two-year struggle to decide which of his sons, Absalom or David, to name as his successor, the drama was chosen as the best play of the 1956 Off Broadway season.

• Mr. Abel's 1984 memoir, The Intellectual Follies (W. W. Norton), which opens at the end of the 1920's, gives glimpses of legendary Greenwich Village figures like Joe Gould and Maxwell Bodenheim, recalls the radical politics of the 1930's and revisits life in Paris in the postwar years and New York in the 50's, when Mr. Abel was friendly with Abstract Expressionist painters like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.

• In a review of the book in The New York Times, John Gross noted that some of the material was familiar. Yet Mr. Abel never leaves you with the feeling that you have heard it all before, he wrote. He is too independent and effervescent for that; his mind goes off on too many unexpected tangents. Among Mr. Abel's other books was Important Nonsense, a 1987 collection of essays about writers like Dostoyevsky, Bertrand Russell, Jean Genet, Edmund Wilson, Arthur Koestler and Jean-Paul Sartre. Mr. Abel was Sartre's authorized translator.

At the time he signed Humanist Manifesto II, Abel was a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

He wrote The Intellectual Folies (1984) and Important Nonsense (1987).

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