John Carey, Literary Eminence Who Excoriated Snobbery, Dies at 91 - The New York Times

An Oxford professor and renowned critic, he was pugnacious, fearless and disdainful of the received wisdom of his intellectual milieu. By Michael S. Rosenwald John Carey, a critic and professor of literature at the University of Oxford who lobbed contrarian hand grenades at high-culture snobs and ossified elites who, in his view, revered lofty affectation over accessibility and saw appreciating the arts as a path to moral superiority, died on Dec. 11 in Oxford, England. He was 91. His death, in a nursing home, was confirmed by his son Leo. Pugnacious, fearless and disdainful of academia’s more pretentious mores, Professor Carey was a paradoxical figure in the British literary establishment for more than half a century. As the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford from 1975 to 2002, he held one of the most prestigious positions in letters. But in several books, along with the reviews he wrote for The Sunday Times of London for nearly 50 years, he challenged the sacred cows an

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