Her essays, fiercely present in the moment and epic in length, buttonholed readers so they’d feel as if they were sitting next to her in the dark, seeing everything she saw. She upended journalistic criticism the way contemporaneous New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson revolutionized reportage. Week after week, she whipped up torrents of copy that could make causes célèbres out of even the most ephemeral Hollywood fluff. Her prime years as a critic happily coincided with sequential renaissances in foreign cinema (the 1960s) and American movies (the 1970s). Such was the power of Kael’s voluminous writing about movies that she transformed the sensibility and standards of mainstream pop culture criticism in America - mostly for the better, despite her bullying personality (in print and in life), her sloppy professional ethics and her at times careerist escapades in self-dramatizing contrarianism. In his introduction to “The Age of Movies,” the Library of America anthology canonizing Pauline Kael, Sanford Schwartz writes that she was “undoubtedly the most fervently read American critic of any art” during her two-decade tenure at The New Yorker.
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