Walter F. Kerr; Drama Critic, Author

Walter F. Kerr, an author and drama critic for the New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for “the whole body of his critical work,” has died of congestive heart failure. He was 83.

His wife, Jean Kerr, who wrote “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” among other works, said he died Wednesday at a nursing home after a two-year illness.

Kerr first wrote criticism in 1949 for Commonweal, a Roman Catholic weekly. But he earned his reputation as a penetrating and insightful critic while writing for the New York Herald Tribune from 1951 to 1966.

After the Herald folded, he went to work for the Times from 1966 until he retired in 1983. He won his Pulitzer in 1978.

Kerr was labeled a “Supercritic” by Newsweek magazine when he took the job at the Times, but he did not enjoy the power to make or break Broadway shows. He insisted on writing mainly for the Sunday paper, where he would be one voice among several critics.

“He was a man who loved the theater,” said his friend, caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. “Even if you didn’t agree with what he said, you wanted to see the show because the review was so well written. He was a great wordsmith.”

Kerr was honored in 1990 when the restored Ritz Theater in Manhattan’s theater district was renamed the Walter Kerr Theater.

Kerr wrote 10 books, including “Criticism and Censorship,” “How Not to Write a Play,” “The Decline of Pleasure” and “The Silent Clowns,” which celebrated the comedians of the silent film era.

In reviewing Kerr’s collection of articles, “Journey to the Center of the Theater” in 1979, former Los Angeles Times theater critic Sylvie Drake wrote: “Kerr makes you visualize a play you haven’t seen and care about it--positively or negatively. He fills in the backdrop, fleshes out an era, using language as a lapidarian uses tools and using instinct to evaluate the way a navigator consults a compass.”

Kerr earned his degrees at Northwestern University and taught speech and drama at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., prior to his career as a critic. On campus he directed, wrote and adapted plays.

Besides his wife, Kerr is survived by five sons, a daughter and nine grandchildren.