Naomi Lebowitz

Naomi Gordon Lebowitz (born February 6, 1932) is a literary philosopher, author, critic, and scholar of American, English, Scandinavian, and continental European literature, as well as a translator of Danish fiction.

Her seven book-length critical studies of authors and thinkers have focused on the difficulties of spiritual and religious passion in the face of modern belief systems.^[1] Lebowitz's studies were sometimes eclipsed by the concentration of American academics on deconstructionist theory during the latter decades of the twentieth-century. More recent approaches that value intersectionality and historicism, however, have validated her importance as a scholar, critic, and philosopher.

Lebowitz's acclaimed translation of the Nobel-Prize winning Danish author Henrik Pontoppidan's 1917 novel Lykke-Per (English: Lucky Per) was published in 2010. In Lebowitz's "fluent and lucid version", Lucky Per was hailed by James Wood in The New Yorker as a "shattering, sometimes unbearably powerful novel".^[2] The first translation into English of the novel, it was republished by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019 in an Everyman's Library edition.^[2]