The Sewanee Review has received word that longtime contributor Earl H. Rovit passed away on April 16 at the age of ninety. Rovit was a contributor of essays and criticism to the Review for over forty years. A leading literary scholar of the writing of Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow and William Faulkner, Rovit was one of the first in the early 1960s to discern and explore what became known as the Jewish American literary tradition, including writers such as Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. One highlight of his illustrious career was publishing Ernest Hemingway, a book of critical interpretation and discussion of the author’s works. Rovit also published three novels, The Player King, Crossings, and A Far Cry, which the New York Times Book Review called “deft and audacious.” We mourn the loss of this great literary mind and remember his many outstanding contributions to our publication, most recently the essay “Confessions of a Renter” in the Summer 2012 issue.
