Irving Howe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Part of the Politics series on the Third Camp |
|
Concepts Prominent figures Groups |
| Communism Portal
|
Irving Howe (June 11, 1920 – 1993), was born Irving Horenstein in New York, the son of immigrants who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression.
Like many New York Intellectuals, Howe attended City College and graduated in 1940, alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Upon his return, he began writing literary and cultural criticism for the influential Partisan Review and became a frequent essayist for Commentary, Politics, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. In 1954, Howe helped found the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death in 1993.
Since his CCNY days, Howe was committed to left-wing politics. He was a member of the Young People's Socialist League and then Max Shachtman's Workers Party, where Shactman made Howe his understudy. After 1948, he joined the Independent Socialist League, where he was a central leader and left the ISL to co-found the Democratic Socialists of America. He was a voceferous opponent of both Soviet totalitarianism and McCarthyism, called into question standard Marxist doctrine, and came into conflict with the New Left after criticizing their unmitigated radicalism. Later in life, his politics gravitated toward more pragmatic democratic socialism and foreign policy, a position still represented in the idiosyncratic political and social arguments of Dissent.
Known for lucid literary criticism as well social and political activism, Howe wrote seminal studies on Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, politics and the novel, and a sweeping cultural history of Eastern European Jews in America entitled World of Our Fathers. He also edited and translated many Yiddish stories, and commissioned the first English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer for the Partisan Review. He also wrote A Margin of Hope, his autobiography, and Socialism and America.
[edit] External links
- Dissent, the quarterly that Howe founded and edited.
- from The New York Intellectuals, by Alan M. Wald
- Arguing the World a PBS documentary
- Irving Howe at the Internet Movie Database
