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"... scrupulous, fair-minded and richly-detailed study... the book charts one of the most remarkable intellectual careers of the 20th century's latter half.... What is most heartening about Mr. Alexander's biography is its exemplary civility and nuance in discussing ideas across the lines of political difference." -- Nathan Glick, Washington Times "Anyone interested in Howe's varied career, and the historical context that has given it its particular shape -- American radicalism, the Cold War and anticommunism, the New Left, literary modernism, Jewish life -- will profit handsomely from reading Alexander's respectful book." -- Wilson Quarterly "Edward Alexander's captivating study of Irving H...
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Irving Howe and the Critics is a selection of essays and reviews about the work of Irving Howe (1920?93), a vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation. Howe authored eighteen books, edited twenty-five more, wrote dozens of articles and reviews, and edited the magazine Dissent for forty years after founding it. His writings cover subjects ranging from U.S. labor to the vicissitudes of American communism and socialism to Yiddishkeit and contemporary politics. His book World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. ΓΈ John Rodden has chosen essays and reviews that focus on Howe?s major works and on the disputes they generated. He features both Dissent contributors and those who have dissented from the Dissenters?on the Right as well as the Left. Rodden includes a few stern assessments of Howe from his less sympathetic critics, testifying not only to the range of response?from admiration to hostility?that his work received but also to his stature on the Left as a prime intellectual target of neoconservative fire.
"Combative, compassionate, objective, ironic, restless, Howe reflects on people, ideas, and events..." A selection from Irving Howe's work covering 40 years of writing.
A compilation of Irving Howe's interviews during the last fifteen years of his life, this book represents what could be viewed as the sequel to Howe's intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope, which took the story of his life only up to the late 1970s. Many of these interviews were never published and have existed only as personal tapes in the hands of such scholars and activists as Todd Gitlin and Maurice Isserman. Others were originally published in such venues as The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the PBS documentary Arguing the World. Howe never organized his thoughts about the last fifteen years of his life, during which he gained renown for World of Our Fathers, received a...
A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.
An indispensable collection of one of America's most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, lit...
Politics and the Novel clarifies the role of revolutionary ideas in fiction, establishing the role of the political novel, and tracing the growth of this novel into the 20th century. Examples are drawn from such classics as Stendhal's The Red and the Black, Dostoevsky's The Possessed, Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Howe examines how American novels failed to integrate ideology into their works, including DeForests' Playing the Mischief, Adams' Democracy, James' The Bostonians, and Hawthorne's The Bilthedale Romance. he also discusses political fiction after World War II: Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Naipaul's Bend in the River, and Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, among others.
"Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now back in print after its initial publication in 1977 and with a new introduction by the author, The Romance of American Communism is a landmark work of new journalism, profiling American Communist Party members and fellow travelers as they joined the Party, lived within its orbit, and left in disillusionment and disappointment as Stalin's crimes became public. From the immigrant Jewish enclaves of the Bronx and Brooklyn and the docks of Puget Sound to the mining towns of Kentucky and the suburbs of Cleveland, over a million Americans found a sense of belonging and an expanded sense of self through collective struggle. They also found social isolation, blacklisting, imprisonment, and shattered hopes. This is their story--an indisputably American story.
Eight stories portray the world of the New York intellectual during the 1930s and 40s, probing the conflict between ambitious, educated youths and their immigrant parents.