David Lenson

David Lenson is the editor of the Massachusetts Review; he plays saxophone with Ed Vadas and with the Reprobate Blues Band.

Brother Barry remembers David as a Victory Baby, born in 1945; the boys grew up together in Nutley, New Jersey. Their mother, June, was an aspiring poet; their father, Michael, was director of the murals project for the Works Progress Administration in New Jersey and painted murals in Newark City Hall and Weequahic High School. The Jewish comedian Sam Levenson was their uncle. 

From his youngest days, Dave wrote poems and played the saxophone in combos that practiced “Tequila” and other songs in the Lenson living room. After graduating from Nutley High School in 1963, David headed off to college at Princeton, where he stayed until he earned his doctorate in 1971. He began teaching that same year in the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He would retire forty-two years later, in 2013, after suffering a stroke. Former President of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the faculty union at UMass, he was also the former editor of the Massachusetts Review. Lenson published two books on tragedy—Achilles’s Choice and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, A Commentary—as well as two books of poetry, The Gambler and Ride the Shadow. 

He was best known for his monograph On Drugs, published by the University of Minnesota Press. A one-of-a-kind examination of drugs, drug users, the uses of drugs, and the pervasiveness of drugs in contemporary culture, the study was blurbed by Timothy Leary and reviewed by the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, and the Utne Reader; it was also a key source for Michael Pollan’s bestselling The Botany of Desire, and David appeared as a talking head on the PBS documentary based on the book.