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1 NOVEMBER 1935-25 SEPTEMBER 2003
EDWARD W. SAID, who died on 25 September 2003, was best known for his enormously influential book Orientalism (1978) and for his unceasing activity on behalf of the Palestinian people. He had been ill for some time, and his illness had certainly complicated his life and diminished his energy. To those who knew him and heard him and read him, however, his energy seemed formidable right to the end, and continued to abound in all the areas that so intensely interested him: literature, politics, music, history, philosophy, film, and much else.
Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935, and moved to Egypt with his family at the time of partition in 1947. He attended secondary school in the United States and took his first degree at Princeton, where he studied with the distinguished critic R. P. Blackmur. Said went on to receive a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Harvard. From 1963 until his death he taught at Columbia University. He won the Lionel Trilling Award for his second book, Beginnings (1975), and became Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and then university professor. From the late 1970s until 1991, Said was a member of the Palestinian National Council. He helped to bring about the formation of the Palestinian National Initiative, founded in 2002 as a democratic opposition movement in Palestinian politics. Often attacked in the British and American press for his stance on Palestine, Said also had the distinction of seeing his writings banned by Yasir Arafat's administration for their critical and independent line of thought. Said often insisted that it was the intellectual's task to "speak truth to power," and he did so fearlessly and tirelessly, whatever the power in question was.
Said's early work in literature was strongly connected to European philology and philosophy. He translated Erich Auerbach, who would always remain one of his scholarly heroes, and Lukács, to whose austere thought he was also in many ways faithful. Said's first book (1966), on Joseph Conrad, took from phenomenology the idea of a writer's career as a project, not...