Leo Gurko

Edu­cator, Author, Lit­er­ary Crit­ic

1914–2008

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Books and publications

• [amazonify]B001O4CBFI::text::::Heart of Dark­ness[/amazonify] by Joseph Con­rad (Easton Press 1980), hard­cov­er. (Intro­duc­tion by Leo Gurko)
• Joseph Con­rad, Giant in Exile (New York: Macmil­lan 1979)
• Thomas Wolfe: Beyond the Roman­tic Ego (New York: Crow­ell 1975)
• [amazonify]B000IC7MYC::text::::Three Tales of the Sea[/amazonify] by Joseph Con­rad (Her­itage Press 1972) (incl. Youth — Typhoon ‑The End Of The Teth­er) (Intro­duc­tion by Leo Gurko)
• Ernest Hem­ing­way and the Pur­suit of Hero­ism (New York: Crow­ell 1968)
• [amazonify]B000PGQ0TY::text::::Poems of Per­cy Bysshe Shel­ley[/amazonify] (Crow­ell 1968) (Intro­ductin by Leo Gurko, illus. by Lars Bo)
• The Two Lives of Joseph Con­rad (New York: Crow­ell 1965)
• Tom Paine, Free­dom’s Apos­tle (New York: Crow­ell June 1957) (Win­ner of New­ber­ry Award)
• Heroes, High­brows and the Pop­u­lar Mind (1953)
• The Angry Decade (New York: Harp­er & Row 1947)

  Where the Marx­ists drew their inspi­ra­tion from the social­ist thinkers of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, the Agrar­i­ans went back to Plato and his philoso­pher-kings vig­or­ous­ly trained to rule the state, to Car­lyle and super­man for­mu­lators of mod­ern times, to Chesterton and Bel­loc and their strong reli­gious ortho­doxy.

  The Colum­bia World of Quo­ta­tions

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Additional facts and anecdotes

Literary debates on television

While a pro­fes­sor at Hunter Col­lege, Gurko dis­cussed books on tele­vi­sion for the “Author Meets the Crit­ics” pro­gram. On the night of July 15, 1951, Gurko appeared oppo­site
famed news­pa­per mag­nate Her­bert Bayard Swope, Jr. (whose Long Island man­sion was the fic­ti­tious home of Jay Gats­by). The sub­ject that evening was not a book but rather the Lights Out tele­vi­sion pro­gram, which Swope spoke for and Gurko against. [ref­er­ence]

Miriam Gurko

Leo Gurko’s wife, Miri­am Gurko (d. 1988), was an inde­pen­dent schol­ar, researcher and author.

In 1989, Leo donat­ed Inventory of the Miri­am Gurko — Floyd Dell Papers, 1958–1968 to The New­ber­ry Library (Roger and Julie Baskes Depart­ment of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions) in Chica­go, IL. The papers are a col­lec­tion of cor­re­spon­dence on the sub­ject of Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay and a draft of Miri­am Gurko’s book, The Let­ters of Floyd Dell About Edna St. Vin­cent Mil­lay.