Discipline: Literature

Hollis Alpert

Discipline: Literature
MacDowell Fellowships: 1948, 1949, 1957
Hollis Alpert (1916-2007) was a movie critic who rose to prominence in the 1960s, best remembered today for his role in creating the National Society of Film Critics. He served as a combat historian with the U.S. Army during the World War II. Some of his accounts of warfare were published by magazines, which gave him entrée into New York-based mass media after he left the military. Alpert worked as an editor for The New York Times from 1950-56 while freelancing as a book and movie reviewer. He was then hired as a movie critic by the Saturday Review, where he rose to prominence. In 1966, Alpert, Pauline Kael, and other critics who worked for magazines founded the National Society of Film Critics because the New York Film Critics Circle was dominated by movie reviewers at the big New York dailies. Alpert, Kael, and others found the established critics be stodgy and old-fashioned, so they created their own organization to herald what they considered the new, vital works that were revolutionizing cinema. After leaving the Saturday Review in 1975, Alpert worked for American Film Magazine until 1981.

Studios

Irving Fine

Hollis Alpert worked in the Irving Fine studio.

Youngstown Studio was given to MacDowell by friends of Miss Myra McKeown in Youngstown, OH, where she promoted both art and music. It was renamed Irving Fine Studio in 1972 in honor of Irving Fine, a distinguished composer, conductor, and teacher who was a MacDowell Fellow during the 1940s and 1950s. The simple interior of the studio…

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