Author Guide · Criticism & Essays
Books Written by
In 1946, back from the war in the Pacific, Anatole Broyard opened a secondhand bookshop on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. Twenty-five years later he was a daily book critic at The New York Times, a job he held for about fifteen years, before writing a column and editing at the Book Review. In 1989 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and in the fourteen months before his death in October 1990 he wrote about being ill with the same wit he had brought to other people’s books. Those essays, and an unfinished memoir of the Village, were published after he died. This guide covers his four key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 4 key books · 1974–1993 · Updated October 2026
ClickTap a spine to jump to that book below.
Quick answer
Anatole Broyard published four books: Aroused by Books (1974), Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980), and two that appeared after his death in 1990, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage (1993). Start with Intoxicated by My Illness, his essays on facing cancer; it is short, and it is the book still read today in medicine as well as literature.
Where to Start with Anatole Broyard
If you want his best-known book
→ Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) — essays written in the last fourteen months of his life.
If you want a memoir of literary New York
→ Kafka Was the Rage (1993) — Greenwich Village just after the Second World War.
If you want the critic at work
→ Aroused by Books (1974) — his reviews from The New York Times.
If you want his personal essays
→ Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980).
4 Anatole Broyard Books, in Order
Aroused by Books
His first book, published by Random House three years after he started as a daily reviewer at The New York Times. It collects reviews he wrote for the paper.
Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes
A collection of personal essays, published by Methuen in 1980, the only book of his own essays to appear in his lifetime.
Intoxicated by My Illness
Six pieces, three written after his cancer diagnosis in 1989 and three from earlier in his career, with a foreword by the neurologist Oliver Sacks and an epilogue by his wife, Alexandra. They include “The Patient Examines the Doctor”, in which he asks for a doctor who is “a bit of a metaphysician”, and “What the Cystoscope Said”, a 1954 story about his father’s death from cancer. It was a New York Times Notable Book and is regarded as a foundational text of medical humanities and narrative medicine.
Kafka Was the Rage
An unfinished memoir of the late 1940s: the young Broyard opens a used bookshop on Cornelia Street, takes classes at the New School and has an affair with Sheri Donatti (the painter Sheri Martinelli), a protégée of Anaïs Nin. Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas and William Gaddis pass through. In 2019 The New York Times named it one of the 50 best memoirs of the previous 50 years.
In What Order to Read Anatole Broyard
The four books do not depend on each other, and publication order is not the best way in. The two early collections are his journalism; the two posthumous books are the ones he is remembered for, and the easiest to find.
Begin with Intoxicated by My Illness, then read Kafka Was the Rage for the young man who would become the critic. Go back to Aroused by Books and Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes if you want more of his voice; both are out of print and mostly found second-hand.
A reading path
1. Intoxicated by My Illness (1992)
2. Kafka Was the Rage (1993)
3. Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980)
4. Aroused by Books (1974)
The years · 1920–2007
Quick facts about Anatole Broyard
- Known for
- He is known as a New York Times book critic of the 1970s and 1980s whose essays on his own dying, published after his death, became a founding text of narrative medicine.
- 1920
- Born in New Orleans
- 1948
- “A Portrait of the Hipster” in Partisan Review
- 1971
- Daily book critic at The New York Times
- 2007
- His daughter Bliss publishes One Drop
- Born
- 16 July 1920, New Orleans, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family
- Died
- 11 October 1990, Massachusetts, of prostate cancer
- War service
- U.S. Army in the Pacific during the Second World War
- Education
- Brooklyn College; the New School for Social Research on the GI Bill
- Worked
- The New York Times: daily reviewer from 1971, columnist from 1984, Book Review editor from 1986
- Taught
- Creative writing at the New School, New York University and Columbia
- Family
- Married Alexandra Nelson, a dancer; children Todd and Bliss
The red mark is 1992: Intoxicated by My Illness, published two years after his death.
How Anatole Broyard Writes: The Critic’s Sentence
Broyard wrote short. His daily reviews had to fit a newspaper column, and his books are short too: Intoxicated by My Illness runs to about 135 pages and Kafka Was the Rage to about 160. He builds his pieces from aphorisms and surprising metaphors rather than long argument; Publishers Weekly singled out the line “When the cancer threatened my sexuality, my mind became immediately erect.”
He read his own illness the way he read a novel. In “The Patient Examines the Doctor” he asks for a doctor who will treat the patient as a story, someone who could be his “Virgil” through “my purgatory or inferno”. He believed he could die with style, and the essays refuse both cliché and passivity: he treats being ill as something to think his way through.
The memoir works by the same economy. Kafka Was the Rage is a set of scenes rather than a life story: the bookshop, the New School lectures, the women, the parties. It stops in the late 1940s, partly because he died before he could finish it, and leaves out almost everything about where he came from, a gap that Henry Louis Gates Jr. and his daughter Bliss later wrote about.
Frequently asked questions about Anatole Broyard’s books
How many books has Anatole Broyard written?
Four. Two were published in his lifetime, Aroused by Books (1974) and Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980), and two after his death in 1990, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage (1993). He also published stories and essays in magazines, such as “A Portrait of the Hipster” (Partisan Review, 1948).
What are Anatole Broyard’s books in order?
Aroused by Books (1974), Men, Women and Other Anticlimaxes (1980), Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993).
Where should I start with Anatole Broyard?
With Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), his essays on living with prostate cancer, written in the last fourteen months of his life. Then read Kafka Was the Rage (1993), his memoir of Greenwich Village after the war.
What is Anatole Broyard’s most famous book?
Intoxicated by My Illness (1992), regarded as a foundational text of narrative medicine. Kafka Was the Rage (1993) is the other well-known one; in 2019 The New York Times named it one of the 50 best memoirs of the previous 50 years.
What is Intoxicated by My Illness about?
It collects six pieces on illness and death: three written after his cancer diagnosis in 1989, three from earlier in his career, including the 1954 story “What the Cystoscope Said” about his father’s death. Oliver Sacks wrote the foreword and his wife, Alexandra, the epilogue. Its central argument is that a doctor should pay attention to the patient as a person and a story, not only to the disease.
Who is in Kafka Was the Rage?
Broyard himself in his twenties, running a bookshop on Cornelia Street and studying at the New School, and Sheri Donatti, the name he gives the painter Sheri Martinelli, with whom he had a relationship. Anaïs Nin, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas and William Gaddis also appear.
Was Anatole Broyard Black?
He was born in New Orleans in 1920 into a Louisiana Creole family of African American descent, and as an adult he lived as white; his children say they learned of his ancestry only around the time of his death. Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote about his life in “White Like Me” (The New Yorker, 1996), later collected as “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”. His daughter Bliss Broyard traced the family history in One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life (2007).
Is The Human Stain about Anatole Broyard?
Philip Roth said it is not. In an open letter published by The New Yorker in September 2012 he wrote that the novel (2000) was inspired by what happened to his friend Melvin Tumin, a sociology professor at Princeton, and that the Broyard connection came from “the babble of literary gossip”.
Was Anatole Broyard a New York Times critic?
Yes. He became a daily book reviewer at The New York Times in 1971 and held the job for nearly fifteen years, got his own column in the Book Review in 1984 and became an editor there in 1986. He retired after his diagnosis in 1989.
When did Anatole Broyard die?
On 11 October 1990, aged 70, of prostate cancer. Both of his best-known books were published after his death.
Footnotes
- Anatole Broyard — Wikipedia
- Intoxicated by My Illness — Wikipedia
- Kafka Was the Rage — Penguin Random House
- Anatole Paul Broyard (1920–1990) — BlackPast
- One Drop by Bliss Broyard — Kirkus Reviews
- Philip Roth’s open letter to Wikipedia — Philip Roth Society, 2012
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”
— Anatole Broyard, “Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling”, The New York Times (22 February 1987)
If this shelf interested you, the full bookshelf has more: reading lists by theme, author guides, and notes on what is actually worth your time.
Browse the full bookshelf Get book recommendations