Leonard Kriegel, an American memoirist and essayist whose work blazed with rage at the loss of the use of his legs to polio, died on Sept. 25 in Manhattan. He was 89.

An academic and literary critic who taught for many years at the City College of New York, Mr. Kriegel was known for scholarly and popular writings that examined large historical phenomena (the struggles of the labor movement, the social construction of masculinity, the treatment of disabled people) at the level of the individual life — often his own.

Throughout his life, Mr. Kriegel’s rage provided ballast against despair. Even the onset of his illness, he recalled in an essay in “Flying Solo,” was not entirely devoid of hope. As he recounted it, his father, on learning that Leonard had contracted polio, raced upstate from his delicatessen job without stopping to change his clothes.

“He sat alongside my bed in the small hospital in Cold Spring, imploring me to live and feeding me vanilla ice cream,” Mr. Kriegel wrote. “What remains as vivid in memory today as it was more than 50 years ago is the odor that clung to my father’s hand as he fed me that ice cream. I could smell the dry-sweat prospect of my death on that hand. Yet beyond that was the smell of pickle brine and smoked salmon and chopped herring that mixed with the rich creamy taste of the vanilla ice cream. For whatever incomprehensible reason, the mixing of smells was a father’s promise to a son that he would live.”