Leo Gurko

Educator, Author, Literary Critic

1914-2008

[CV]

Books and publications

• Heart of Darkness 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)
• Three Tales of the Sea 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)
• Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (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

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.