Irving Howe

Irving Howe (June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993), was an American literary and social critic. He was born as Irving Horenstein in New York, as a 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. He left the ISL in the early 1950s. As the request of his friend Michael Harrington, he helped co-found the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the early 1970s. DSOC merged into the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, with Howe as a vice-chair. He was a vociferous 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".

A biography of Howe, entitled "Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent", was published by Gerald Sorin.

Selected publications

*"The American Communist Party, a critical history, 1919-1957", with Lewis Coser with the assistance of Julius Jacobson. Boston, Beacon Press, 1957.
* "Beyond the new left", New York, McCall Pub. Co., 1970. ISBN 0841500215
* "Decline of the new", New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970
* "Celebrations and attacks : thirty years of literary and cultural commentary", New York : Horizon Press, 1979. ISBN 0818011769
* "A Margin of Hope: An intellectual Autobiography", Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. ISBN 0-15-157138-4.
* "Socialism and America", San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

External links

* [http://www.dissentmagazine.org "Dissent"] , the quarterly that Howe founded and edited.
* [http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/wald-on-howe.html from "The New York Intellectuals", by Alan M. Wald]
* [http://www.pbs.org/arguing/ Arguing the World] a PBS documentary
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