Phillip Lopate (born November 16, 1943) is an American essayist, film critic, fiction writer, and poet.
Early life
He was born in Brooklyn to Jewish parents, Fran Beslow and Albert Lopate; his father was an aspiring writer whose mother tongue was Yiddish.[1][2][3] His parents ran a candy store together and had a tumultuous marriage, and he was raised in relative poverty in tenements in Williamsburg.[2][3] As a teenager, he joined the local Orthodox Jewish choir and had considered studying to become a cantor.[2][4]
Lopate worked as a writer-in-the-schools for twelve years and his memoir Being With Children came out of his association with the artists-in-the-school organization Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Lopate coordinated T&W's first project (at Manhattan's P.S. 75), the model for which led to similar programs in all 50 states.[7]
Lopate has written about architecture and urbanism for Metropolis, The New York Times, Double Take, Preservation, Cite, and 7 Days, where he wrote a bimonthly architectural column. He has served as a committee member for the Municipal Art Society and as a consultant for Ric Burns' PBS documentary on the history of New York City.[5]
Media critic
He has written about movies for The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cinemabook, Threepenny Review, Tikkun, American Film, The Normal School, and the anthology The Movie That Changed My Life, among others. A volume of his selected movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1998. He edited a massive anthology of American film criticism from the silent era to present day, entitled American Movie Critics: From Silents Until Now, was published in March 2006 for Library of America.[5]
Personal life
He has been married twice. In 1964, he married Carol Bergman, before divorcing in 1970.[9][10][11]
↑Ascher, Carol. “On Becoming Carol Ascher.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 1989, pp. 32–35. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3346439. Accessed 9 Aug. 2025.
↑Lopate, Philip (September 2023). The Love of My WifeHarper's Magazine. Retrieved on 9 August 2025
↑"Phillip Lopate". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved June 6, 2023.
