NEW YORK – Stanley Kauffmann, the erudite critic, author and editor who reviewed movies for The New Republic for more than 50 years, wrote his own plays and fiction, and helped discover the classic novels “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Moviegoer,” died Wednesday. He was 97.

Kauffmann died of pneumonia at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan, said Adam Plunkett, assistant literary editor at The New Republic.

Kauffmann started at The New Republic in 1958 and remained there – except for a brief interlude – for the rest of his life, becoming one of the oldest working critics in history. He wrote during a dynamic era that featured the rise of the French New Wave and the emergence of such American directors as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. He was among the last survivors of a generation of reviewers that included The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and the Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris.

“I think it is the end of an era, and the passing of an extraordinary writer who had seen silent films as a boy and kept up with the most advanced pictures of the 21st century,” David Thomson, a fellow film critic at The New Republic, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. “He was a superb critic and a very kind and generous man.

“But I know he would have said: ‘End of an era? What nonsense. We advance!’ ”

Never as famous as Kael or Sarris, Kauffmann still had a dedicated following, with admirers including Susan Sontag and Roger Ebert, who once called him “the most valuable film critic in America.” He received an Emmy in 1964 for his commentary on WNET-TV and a Polk Award for film criticism in 1982. His theater reviews brought him a George Jean Nathan Award in 1974.

The kind of critic who preferred the word “film” to “movies,” Kauffmann was far more skeptical of popular culture than was Kael, with whom he (and so many other reviewers) occasionally feuded. He did not share her passion for “The Godfather” (“an aggrandized gangster film”) or “Nashville” (“a superior book-club novel”). In recent years, he didn’t bother with “Avatar” or other blockbusters, reasoning that they would manage fine without him. He did spread the word about such foreign-language releases as the Russian musical “Hipsters,” a documentary about German painter Gerhard Richter, and the Israeli family drama “Footnote.”

When the American Film Institute was compiling a list of the 20th century’s best movies, Kauffmann declined to participate, worrying he would be “trampled under the thundering herd” of opinions with which he disagreed.

Kauffmann worked in publishing in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote several novels, among them “The Philanderer,” released in Britain in 1953, soon banned and the subject of a landmark obscenity trial.