Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent

Gerald Sorin

Published by New York University Press 2003

Irving Howe

A Life of Passionate Dissent

Gerald Sorin

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814708842.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

An illuminating biography of an American intellectual and one of the century's most important public thinkers whose commitment to social reform was balanced by his love of fiction, poetry, baseball, and music.

A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection
Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History
By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought.
In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years.
Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

Author / Editor information

Sorin Gerald :

Gerald Sorin is Distinguished Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies at SUNY New Paltz. His most recent book is Tradition Transformed: The Jewish Experience in America.

Reviews

What Sorin has accomplished in this beautifully written, balanced and probing intellectual biography is the most complete picture we have of Howe, a portrait of how one Jewish intellectual and activist struggled daily to balance scholarship and politics and the life of the mind and a life of action. . . . Sorin has ably captured the life and passion of this most unusual man, whose commitment to democracy is a legacy still worth cherishing.

Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent offers such an intellectually detailed and conceptually animated account of Howes work. Sorin did an excellent job.

Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe's life and times

Morris Dickstein,author, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties:
Irving Howes career, with its constantly shifting strands of political activism, literary commentary, and accessible Jewish scholarship, makes a great subject for an intellectual biography. Painstakingly researched and fluently written, Gerald Sorins book strikes just the right balance between sympathetic identification and critical distance. Making excellent use of interviews, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Sorin recreates the many significant issues that engaged Howe. He brings considerable drama to Howes gradual break with Marxist sectarianism, his shifting perspectives on socialism, his momentous reconnection to Jewish culture, his battles with the New Left, and the literary controversies that accompanied his steady growth as a subtle reader and vigorous, penetrating critic.

Deborah Dash Moore,author of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.:
Gerald Sorin has written a lively and compelling biography of Irving Howe. A New York intellectual, Howe figured in most of the major and many of the minor debates of mid-twentieth-century America: socialism, modernism, Yiddish culture, civil rights, the new politics of postwar America, and the antiwar movement of the turbulent sixties. Howe spoke out forcefully and fearlessly, carving a place for intellectuals with moral vision. Sorins first biography deftly captures the complexity of the man and his eras.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
1 The Trauma of Sharply Fallen Circumstances: World of Our Fathers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2 Illusions of Power and Coherence at CCNY: World of College Politics in the 1930s Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
3 The Second World War and the Myopia of Socialist Sectarianism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
4 The Postwar World and the Reconquest of Jewishness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
5 Toward a “World More Attractive” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	78
6 The Origins of Dissent Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
7 The Age of Conformity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
8 The Growth of Dissent and the Breakup of the Fifties Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	140
9 More Breakups Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	158
10 The Turmoil of Engagement: The Sixties: Part 1 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
11 Escalation and Polarization: The Sixties: Part 2 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
12 Retrospection and Celebration Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	246
13 Sober Self-Reflections: Democratic Radical, Literary Critic, Secular Jew Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	364
References Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	365
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	376
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	378

Language: English
Publisher: New York University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Keywords: illuminating; biography; American; intellectual

eBook

Published: January 1, 2003
ISBN: 9780814708842