Dwight Garner (born January 8, 1965) is an American journalist and longtime writer and editor for The New York Times. In 2008, he was named a book critic for the newspaper.

He is the author of Garner's Quotations: A Modern Miscellany and Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements. In 2023 he published his memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading. The book's title refers to the work of the literary critic Seymour Krim, who called his memory "that profuse upstairs delicatessen of mine."

Early life and education

Garner was born in Fairmont, West Virginia, where he grew up until relocating Naples, Florida. He graduated from Middlebury College, where he majored in American literature. While in college, he wrote book criticism for The Village Voice, and was a stringer for The New York Times and the alternative Burlington weekly Vanguard Press.

Career

After his graduation from college, Garner was a reporter for The Addison Independent. He then became the arts editor of the Vermont Times. He also became a contributing editor to the Boston Phoenix. In the 1990s, Garner was a columnist for the Hungry Mind Review. After moving to New York City in 1994, he worked for one year as an associate editor at Harper's Bazaar, under the editorship of Liz Tilberis.

Before becoming a book critic for The New York Times in 2008, he was senior editor of The New York Times Book Review for ten years. He was the founding books editor of Salon.com, where he worked from 1995 to 1998. His monthly column in Esquire magazine was a finalist for a National Magazine Award in 2017.

His essays and journalism have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, the Oxford American, Slate, The Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. For several years he wrote the program notes for Lincoln Center's American Songbook Series. He has served on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. In a January 2011 column for Slate, journalist Timothy Noah called Garner a "highly gifted critic" who reinvigorated The New York Times's literary coverage, likening him to Anatole Broyard and John Leonard.

Garner wrote a biweekly column for The New York Times called "American Beauties," which focused on underappreciated American books of the past seventy-five years. His championing of certain titles—including The Complete Novels of Charles Wright and On Fire by Larry Brown—helped return them to print. For Esquire, Garner played in the 2017 World Backgammon Championship in Monaco.

He is a member of New York City's Organ Meat Society, co-founded by Eater food critic Robert Sietsema. In 2023, Garner's Grub Street Diet, for New York magazine, was one of their most popular pieces of the year. His 2012 New York Times essay in praise of the peanut butter and pickle sandwich, which he called "a thrifty and unacknowledged American classic," went viral internationally. Christina Cauterucci wrote in Slate that Garner "changed my life, intimately and permanently, with an ode to an object I'd never previously considered with the solemnity it deserves: the peanut butter and pickle sandwich." New York Times Cooking has since published the recipe.

In 2023 he published his memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading.

Personal life

Garner lives in New York City with his wife, writer Cree LeFavour. They have two children.