Author and Critic John Leonard, 69; Supported Early Work of Top Writers

Mr. Leonard was once praised as "one of the two or three best literary critics in America." An anti-Vietnam War activist, he was criticized for his candor. (1974 Photo © By Jill Krementz)

He credited his acceptance at Harvard in 1956 with the college's emphasis on geographical diversity more than his academic skill, and he left school after two years.

He was writing wire-service captions in New York when a magazine story he wrote caught the attention of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. He offered Mr. Leonard a summer internship at his conservative magazine.

"I was one of what Buckley calls the apostates," he told the Los Angeles Times, noting his own liberal views. "He hired Garry Wills, Joan Didion and Renata Adler, and thought the charismatics of his personality would take care of the politics," he said. "But he had no illusion about me from the start."

He worked at the liberal Pacifica radio station while attending the University of California at Berkeley. A year after his 1962 graduation, his first novel, "The Naked Martini," was published. Reviewer Harrison Salisbury offered faint praise for "a certain wry wit."

His 1959 marriage to Christiana Morison, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison, ended in divorce. In 1976, he married Sue Nessel, with whom he was a co-editor at the Nation magazine from 1995 to 1998.

She survives, along with two children from his first marriage, Andrew Leonard of Berkeley, Calif., and Amy Leonard of Washington; a stepdaughter, Jen Nessel of New York; his mother, Ruth Smith of Lakewood, Calif.; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Leonard settled in New England in the late 1960s, worked alongside migrant apple pickers and handled public relations for an anti-Vietnam War group. He also had written several book before joining the Times book review staff in 1967.

He received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circle but once described his job as "sorting the signals of an overheated publicity culture, manufacturing opinions instead of widgets."