Dale Peck

In 2019, Peck wrote an article published by The New Republic titled "My Mayor Pete Problem," referring to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, which, though its views were supported in a Spectator column, was subsequently criticized as homophobic. The New Republic pulled the article after hours online. Editor Chris Lehmann stated, "The New Republic recognizes that this post crossed a line, and while it was largely intended as satire, it was inappropriate and invasive."

In 2016, Peck was named editor-in-chief of the revived online Evergreen Review. "I want the magazine to be something between a community and a place where lone wolves hang out," Peck said at the site's launch in March 2017. "I have a preference for experimental literature, but for genuinely experimental literature as opposed to literature that says it is experimental but it is really just repeating someone else’s experiment from 70 years ago. All good literature is experimental, at least in the sense that it invents its own terms."

when The New Republic took a writer down—as it notoriously did with Toni Morrison, Judith Butler, Frank Bidart, Don DeLillo, Elaine Scarry, Colson Whitehead, Kurt Andersen, Sharon Olds, Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Barbara Kingsolver...[it] was the best literary section in the country

With the emergence of the ridiculous Dale Peck, the method of Wieseltier's literary salon reached its reductio ad absurdum. Peck smeared the walls with shit, and bankrupted their authority for all time to come. So many forms of extremism turn into their opposite at the terminal stage. Thus The New Republic' s supposed brief for dry, austere, high-literary value—manifesting itself for years in a baffled rage against everything new or confusing—led to Peck's auto-therapeutic wetness (as self-pity is the refuge of bullies) and hatred of classic modernism (which, to philistines, will always be new and confusing).

In May 2011, Peck's criticism of Jewish American literature in which he claimed "[I]f I have to read another book about the Holocaust, I'll kill a Jew myself" prompted a public outcry. His editors later removed the statement from his article.

Peck's reviews, in turn, were met with criticism, with the editors of Brooklyn-based n+1 magazine, though stating, in 2004, that

In 1996, Peck reviewed the David Foster Wallace best-selling novel Infinite Jest, writing that "[w]hat makes the book’s success even more noteworthy is that it is, in a word, terrible. Other words I might use include bloated, boring, gratuitous, and – perhaps especially – uncontrolled. I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense." Peck, in the same article, also attacked American writers Jonathan Franzen, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, characterizing the latter as "a very clever guy" and his prose as "tentacular – I might almost say...amorphous."

Peck's first novel, Martin and John, was published in 1993. His subsequent work, which continued to explore issues of identity and sexuality, were met with more mixed reviews. Salon.com described Now It's Time to Say Goodbye as a "hyperpotboiler" with a plot "both sensational and preposterous." The New York Review of Books called Martin and John "surprisingly sophisticated", but said Now It's Time to Say Goodbye "collapsed under the weight of its overladen allegorical structures" and diagnosed Peck's fiction as a "seesaw between a strained 'lyricism' ... and cliché."

Peck was born on Long Island, New York. He was raised in Kansas and attended Drew University in New Jersey, graduating in 1989. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994.

Dale Peck (born 1967) is an American novelist, literary critic, and columnist. His 2009 novel, Sprout, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Children's/Young Adult literature, and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award in the Children's and Young Adult Literature category.