John Crosby; Newspaper Columnist, Novelist

John Crosby, 79, a radio and television critic whose New York-based column once was carried by 29 newspapers with an estimated readership of 4 million. Crosby began his career as a reporter with the Milwaukee Sentinel, but was laid off a year later because of the Depression and joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1935. He was the paper’s radio-television critic from 1946 to 1965 and began a syndicated column in 1949. From 1965 to 1975 he wrote a column for the Observer of London and, during much of the 1960s, for what is now the International Herald Tribune in Paris. He also was the author of two collections of columns and more than a dozen novels, including “Wingwalker” in 1989, and had stories published in Life, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, Playboy and other magazines. His honors included a George Foster Peabody Award and a George K. Polk Memorial Award. In Esmont, Va., on Saturday of cancer.