Funeral services were held here Friday for Charles Angoff, a literary figure who achieved fame in both the general and Jewish fields, who died Thursday at New York Hospital at the age of 77. Beginning his career with H. L. Mencken, who had just launched the American Mercury, he joined Fairleigh Dickinson University in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1954 and became professor of English. After retirement in 1976, he taught summer sessions at Vermont University.
Angoff published during his lifetime 30 books of essays, fiction, poetry and plays. He became widely known for a series of novels of Jewish American life centered on a Polonsky family in Boston during World War I and the Great Depression. Critles agreed that the books made up one big novel about American Jewish life.
Among his Jewish activities, Angoff was advisory editor to the Jewish Book Guild, a faculty member of B’nai B’rith Institutes. In 1969, he received a special award for major contributions to Jewish literature from the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
