Booth, Wayne Clayson

▪ 2006

      American literary critic (b. Feb. 22, 1921, American Fork, Utah—d. Oct. 10, 2005, Chicago, Ill.), broke from the New Criticism school, which prevailed in the mid-20th century, to explore the rhetorical techniques used by fiction writers. His groundbreaking first book, The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), revealed how choices regarding structure and narrative voice and other rhetorical devices were used by writers to deepen the author-reader connection and to enrich the reader's experience. In the book Booth coined the familiar concepts of “unreliable narrator,” a narrator who fails to report correctly or comprehend a story's events, and “implied author,” the person of the author as conveyed through a work of fiction. Booth earned a bachelor's degree (1944) from Brigham Young University, Salt Lake City, Utah. After serving in the army during World War II, he continued his studies of literature at the University of Chicago, where he earned master's and doctorate degrees (1947 and 1950, respectively). He taught at Haverford (Pa.) College and Earlham College, Richmond, Ind., before returning to teach at Chicago in 1962. He continued to explore the use of rhetoric, extending his interest to its use in advertising and politics. He cofounded the influential journal Critical Inquiry in 1974, and that same year he published two major works, The Rhetoric of Irony and Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. His book The Company We Keep: The Ethics of Fiction was published in 1988. He retired in 1992.

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