Who is Anatole Broyard from Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir and what is their importance?

Anatole Broyard, who eventually became a literary critic for The New York Times, reflects back on his life as a young man just returning from military service in World War II. Broyard's parents lived in Brooklyn but that wasn't the part of New York where Anatole Broyard was determined to live. Broyard had set his sights on the much more sophisticated and elite neighborhood of Greenwich Village.