Once upon a time, not so many years ago, the term great American writer was understood to mean great white male American writer. There was some diversity among them. They might be Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, agnostic or atheist. They might be well-born or from humble backgrounds. They were usually heterosexual, and often quite flamboyantly so, but if they were not, they kept their sexual habits to themselves in fear of being considered, well, girlish.

Women wrote, to be sure, but men decided what would be published and other men decided who would hear about it. Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird might be wildly popular, but their authors, Margaret Mitchell and Harper Lee, were considered one-book wonders. African American men, even geniuses like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, might have been granted a distant corner of the literary establishment, but they were read by serious white men, whereas their female counterparts were the real invisible people. Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote four novels during the Harlem Renaissance, died in a welfare hotel in Florida where she had supplemented her income by cleaning people’s houses.

The second wave of feminism that hit the United States in the 1970s gave women new determination to be heard, to write about what interested them, and to read what other women were saying about the female condition.

Follow up:

If you’re a young adult, most likely you are reading at least a couple of female authors who would have been dismissed in 1970. How did this come about? I’d like to say it was entirely due to the efforts of feminists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and millions of women like me whom they inspired.

But an unacknowledged white male hero had a lot to do with the women’s renaissance. If anyone can be said to be the Prince Charming of Women’s Lit, it was John Leonard, the writer, editor and critic who died last November and whose life was celebrated this week in New York, where he lived. Not only did Leonard champion writers who were women, with absolutely no racial boundaries, he paved the way for their reception.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the words of Nobel laureate Toni Morrison whose work Leonard, while editor of the New York Times Book Review, brought to prominence. She found Leonard everything she sought in New York City and often found wanting “fast, smart, generous, open-minded, and free.” He also earned high praise from such diverse writers as Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion, Mary Gordon, Susan Faludi, Maureen Howard, and Barbara Ehrenreich, who were quoted in the program. And then there was Steinem, who remembered Leonard as advisor to of a group of writers and editors opposed to the Vietnam war. They withheld their taxes, only to have them sucked away from their banks by the federal government. Leonard, Steinem remembered, helped them feel their efforts had not been wasted, that they had at least cost the government the money it took to pursue them. Most of all, he was kind.

The New York literary world can be harsh and unwelcoming, but over and over women and men came forward to acknowledge Leonard’s generosity and enthusiasm for their work. E.L. Doctorow said that Leonard even apologized for a bad review of his novel The Book of Daniel. Eden Ross Lipson, a friend from their days at Berkeley, told how Leonard plucked her from the parks department and made her the Times’ first woman book reviewer hired since World War II.

If you wonder why Leonard championed women’s works, you had only to listen to the other women on the program whose names you might not have recognized—his cousin Susanne Woods; his daughter, Amy, and stepdaughter, Jen Nessel; his wife, Sue, and, by letter, his mother in California, who called him her best friend.

Truth be told, Leonard loved the literature of women because he first loved women. Raised without a father after age 8, he seems to have escaped the sexual resentment that affected so many of his generation. “Yes,” says Sue, “he loved women in the most wonderful way -- without even a hint of lasciviousness.” The lasciviousness seems to have been reserved for her; the couple married after divorcing their previous spouses and set about reconstituting their extended family—a not uncommon story of the times.

I first knew John Leonard from the Private Lives column he wrote in what had been the “women’s” section of the Times. The column featured his alter ego Dmitri and his thinly disguised family members. (He also has a verbally clever, generous son, Andrew.) That column made the Times safe for the column that followed his, called Hers and written by women taste testing their newly liberated existence. It was as though he had taken a stodgy Gray Lady by the hand and demonstrated that women were, indeed, competent and worth attending. “He single-handedly changed the world of book reviewing by using women to review books about just about everything when he was at the Times,” Sue reminded me.

Besides cultivating women’s literature, Leonard grew vegetables in his back yard, cheered several sports teams (all underdogs), overcame his predilection for booze and cigarettes, pioneered free form radio, and intelligently wrote about and appeared on television. He died two days after the election of his favored presidential candidate, another underdog. He would have turned 70 on the day of his memorial.

These are uncertain days in the publishing business. The Times is one of few newspapers that still prints a separate book review. Editors fall out of publishing houses at a dizzying rate, and no one has time for the slush pile anymore. John Leonard is irreplaceable; he was a man ideally suited for his job and his times. But all of us can share his enthusiasm for life and underdogs and for a good book and a good woman.

(The Columbia Journalism Review has a more comprehensive review of the service at http://www.cjr.org/full_court_press/above_the_fold_remembering_joh.php?page=all)