Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, a cultural critic who, in his columns for The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News and other publications, brought his all-encompassing intellect to bear on Broadway, ballet, bluegrass and practically every art form in between, died on Thursday at the home of a friend in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 65.

His brother, David, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

Mr. Teachout was one of a vanishing breed of cultural mavens: omnivorous, humane, worldly without being pretentious, often leaning conservative in their politics but wholly liberal in how they approached the world and its dizzying array of peoples and cultures. He wore his erudition lightly, enjoying it and hoping that, through his prose, others might as well.

He was comfortable writing about Haydn and Mencken, Ellington and Eakins, Bill Monroe and Balanchine. Born in a small town in Missouri and later earning an undergraduate degree in music journalism, he called himself a “well-informed amateur” and an aesthete — someone who loved beauty in all its forms and believed it was his job to find it and explain it.

He was prolific: For the last 30 years, it has been a rare stretch of days in which his byline did not appear somewhere, and not only because of his weekly obligations at The Journal. He was a critic at large for Commentary; he blogged for Arts Journal; he co-hosted a podcast for American Theater magazine; and for many years he wrote freelance book reviews for The New York Times.

He also wrote several highly regarded biographies, including “The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken” (2002), “Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong” (2009) and “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington” (2013).

He took some of what he learned from digging through the Armstrong archives to write “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” a one-man, one-act play that had its premiere in 2011 in Orlando, Fla. Not to be constrained by prose, he also wrote the librettos for three operas, all by the composer Paul Moravec.