in his day was connected to the flamboyant persona he established. He was known as a tirelessly social man with an enormous capacity for liquor and stimulating conversation, which (given his extensive erotic experiences) could be quite ribald. His friend H. L. Mencken described his dinner table conversation as "a really amazing compound of scandalous anecdotes, shrewd judgments, and devastating witticisms." Numerous memoirs from the period recall him as an unforgettable personality. Huneker's last years were spent in financially straitened circumstances. He continued reviewing concerts to the end of his life, but his freelance work, however prolific, had never afforded him a large income and the sales figures for his many books were moderate at best. He died in New York City of pneumonia in 1921, at the age of sixty-four. He was survived by his second wife and one child, his son by his first marriage. Music critic In the 1880s, Huneker served as the music editor of the Musical Courier, followed by stints with the New York Sun, the New York World, the New York Times, and the Philadelphia Press. In his columns, he proselytized for Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, long before their work was generally accepted, and wrote about all of the major conductors and opera singers of his time. He was a particular (sometimes obsessive) fan of the opera singer Mary Garden, renowned for her singing in Pelléas and Mélisande and Thais, whom he called "an orchidaceous Circe...the nearest approach to Duse on the lyric stage." He expressed reservations that have not stood the test of time, believing that the music of Giacomo Puccini and Sergei Prokofiev would eventually fall out of favor, but many of his judgments have proved prescient. Art critic Though his love of Renaissance art, especially the Flemish realism of Hans Memling and Jan van Eyck, had been formed in his early trips to Europe and often guided his tastes, Huneker was appreciative of the new, more experimental art of Post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Odilon Redon, and Henri Matisse and, among Americans, the modern artists of Alfred Stieglitz's circle (e.g., John Marin, Marsden Hartley), the African-American Impressionist Henry Ossawa Tanner, and the realists of the Ashcan School. He was close friends with the Ash Can painter George Luks, whom he regarded as one of the greatest of American painters. As one