Nora Sayre
Born
Nora Clemens Sayre

September 20, 1932
Hamilton, Bermuda
DiedAugust 8, 2001(2001-08-08) (aged 68)
New York City
Occupations
  • Writer
  • film critic

Nora Clemens Sayre (September 20, 1932 – August 8, 2001) was an American film critic and essayist. She was a reviewer of films for The New York Times in the 1970s, and, from 1981, a writing teacher for many years at Columbia University.[1] She specialised in the Cold War and authored books such as Running Time: Films of the Cold War (1982) in which she examined Hollywood movie-making in the 1950s.[2]

Personal life

Born in Hamilton, Bermuda, her father was Joel Sayre of The New Yorker; family friends were A. J. Liebling and Edmund Wilson.[1][3][4]

She attended Friends Seminary,[5] and was a graduate of Radcliffe College.[6]

A mentor was the English critic and book reviewer John Davenport; he had become acquainted with the Sayre family whilst working as a screenwriter at MGM, when she was a child, and would later visit the adult Sayre with suggestions of things she should read and about which she should write. Sayre noted "after a dose of Davenport, one was all the more responsive to words—either to classical or contemporary prose, or to the random eloquence of the street... his conversation made one immediately want to go home and write. Hence he served as an igniter: He gave one momentum."[7]

She married the economist Robert Neild in 1957 but the marriage was dissolved four years later.[1] She died in 2001, at the age of 68, in New York City.

Legacy

The Nora Sayre Endowed Residency for Nonfiction was created at Yaddo, an artists' community in Saratoga Springs, New York, to support her literary legacy.[8]

Bibliography

  • (1973) Sixties Going on Seventies (Arbor House; reprinted 1996, Rutgers University Press) ISBN 9780385276214
  • (1982) Running time: Films of the Cold War (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group) ISBN 9780385276214
  • (2001) On the Wing: A Young American Abroad (Counterpoint) ISBN 9781582431444

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Nora Sayre obituary". The Independent. September 7, 2001. Archived from the original on June 21, 2022. Retrieved January 15, 2011.
  2. ↑ Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (August 9, 2001). "Nora Sayre, Film Critic And Essayist, Dies at 68". The New York Times. Retrieved January 15, 2011.
  3. ↑ "N. Sayre; Essayist on Cold War Era". Los Angeles Times. August 11, 2001.
  4. ↑ "Obituary: Nora Sayre". TheGuardian.com. August 21, 2001.
  5. ↑ White, Elwyn Brooks; Guth, Dorothy Lobrano (November 16, 2006). Letters of E.B. White. HarperCollins. pp. 158–. ISBN 978-0-06-075708-3. Retrieved January 16, 2011.
  6. ↑ Rathbone, Belinda (2000). Walker Evans: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. pp. 228–. ISBN 978-0-618-05672-9. Retrieved January 16, 2011.
  7. ↑ Sayre, Nora (April 10, 1977). "John Davenport Remembered". The New York Times. p. 6.
  8. ↑ Weiner, Tim (May 20, 2008). Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Random House, Inc. pp. 603–. ISBN 978-0-307-38900-8. Retrieved January 16, 2011.


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