Aldridge, John W.

John (Jack) Watson Aldridge was an esteemed literary critic and professor of English at the University of Michigan (1964-1991). As a critic, Aldridge devoted himself to what he called "the ideal of creative independence and free critical dissent which has come down to us in the central tradition of American thought and letters," ( Current Biography, 1958) and throughout his career he commented upon and critiqued many of the twentieth century's most important writers, including Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison, John Horne Burns, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Miller, Gore Vidal, Wright Morris, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Philip Roth, and Truman Capote, many of whom he also counted as his friends.

John W. Aldridge was born on September 26, 1922 in Sioux City, Iowa to Walther Copher and Nell Madge (Watson) Aldridge. Aldridge spent his early years in Iowa, until the age of twelve, when the family moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee. Aldridge attend the University of Chattanooga (now the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) from 1940 to 1943, and studied English during the summer of 1942 at Middlebury College's School of English at Bread Loaf in Vermont, prior to enlisting in the Army and serving in World War II as an infantry rifleman and information specialist (July 1943- August 1945). Following his military service, during which he earned a Bronze Star and five battle stars for Normandy, Northern France, Rhineland, Central Europe, and the Ardennes, Aldridge enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 1946. At Berkeley, Aldridge worked as the editor of the school's Occident literary magazine, and earned his Bachelor of Arts in 1947.

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