Seymour Krim facts and dates
May 11, 1922 — born in Washington Heights section of Manhattan
1929 — begins school at the Kohut School for Boys in Harrison, New York
1930 — father Abraham Krim dies
1932 — mother Ida Goldberg Krim commits suicide
1935-39 — Attends DeWitt Clinton H.S., Bronx, NY, befriends fellow student Paddy Chayefsky, and writes for student literary magazine, The Magpie.
1939-40 — Briefly attends University of North Carolina (alma mater of his literary hero Thomas Wolfe)
1943 — moves into Greenwich Village
1947 — reviews books for the New York Times
1954 — Edits Manhattan: Stories from the Heart of a Great City
1957 — begins publishing in his signature style with “Anti-Jazz” in the Village Voice. Article questions trend of whites borrowing black jazz lingo. It doesn’t go down easy. Voice readers basically flip. Krim’s cranky career has begun.
1960 — Edits The Beats
1960 — “Making It!” reprinted in The Beat Scene, edited by Elias Wilentz
1961. Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer.
1968. Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer. Expanded edition.
1970. Shake It for the World, Smartass.
1974. You & Me.
. 1984. Interview with Seymour Krim. (American Audio Prose Library)
Aug. 30, 1989. At age 67 Krim, disabled by congestive heart failure, takes his life by overdosing on barbiturates. (A stickler about money, Krim complained about the street price paid for the pills. “If we’re buying so many why can’t we get a discount?”)
1991. What’s This Cat’s Story? The Best of Seymour Krim, edited by Peggy Brooks.
1994. “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” published in The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, edited by Phillip Lopate.
2001. Vivian Gornick terms Krim the “Jewish Joan Didion” in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative.
2001. “What’s This Cat’s Story?” published in Editors: The Best of Five Decades, edited by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford.
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