thought Huneker "a breath of fresh air blowing through the stale atmosphere of the theatre." Publications Mezzotints in Modern Music (1899) Chopin: The Man and His Music (1900) Melomaniacs (1902) Overtones (1904) Iconoclasts (1905) Visionaries (1905) Egoists: A Book of Supermen (1909) Promenades of an Impressionist (1910) Franz Liszt (1911) The Pathos of Distance (1913) Old Fogy (1913) Ivory Apes and Peacocks (1915) New Cosmopolis (1915) The Philharmonic Society of New York and its Seventy-Fifth Anniversary: A retrospect (1917) Unicorns (1917) Bedouins (1920) Painted Veils (1920) Steeplejack (1920) Variations (1921) Intimate Letters of James Gibbons Huneker (1924) Painted Veils (reissued with a preface by Benjamin De Casseres, 1942) The "huneker" Following Huneker's comment about Chopin's Étude Op. 25, No. 11 that "[small]-souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it", Douglas Hofstadter, in his book I Am a Strange Loop, named the unit by which "soul size" is measured the huneker (lower case). Reputation Few American critics have elicited the adulation that was felt by other writers toward Huneker in his lifetime and immediately after his death. "There was no one like him," art critic Henry McBride wrote of Huneker. "His strength lay in his knowledge of life and his ability to write." Art historian Jerome Mellquist agreed, noting that "he could impart a grace and a quality of spiritual audacity unsurpassed by any critic of his generation." Benjamin De Casseres described him as a "perfect furnace of ideas and reading...an Olympian." Theater critic George Jean Nathan eulogized, "He taught us cosmopolitanism....He made possible civilized criticism in this great, prosperous prairie." References Sources Casseres, Benjamin de. James Gibbons Huneker. New York: Joseph Lawren, 1925. Loughery, John. "The New York Sun and Modern Art in America: Charles Fitzgerald, Frederick James Gregg, James Gibbons Huneker, Henry McBride." Arts Magazine (December 1984), pp. 77–82. Mencken, H.L. My Life as Author and Editor (edited by Jonathan Yardley). New York: Knopf, 1993. Schwab, Arnold. James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts.'' Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1963. External links Works by James Huneker in the Universal Library at Carnegie-Mellon 1857 births 1921 deaths American music critics American art critics American essayists The New York Sun people Chopin scholars Classical music critics Pupils of Georges Mathias American male journalists American male essayists 19th-century musicologists