Irving Howe and the Critics

Reviews / Votes

"Tutored by the Old Left of the '30s, Irving Howe became the great educator of the New Left of the '60s, and John Rodden's valuable anthology shows his proteges carrying out their mentor's dedication to the integrity of intellect as a preface to politics."-John Diggins, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the American Left "A splendid and rich collection of arguments and counter-arguments that teaches us a great deal not only about Irving Howe, but about American politics and culture in the 20th Century and about what we can rightly call 'The Age of the Intellectual.' Rodden has done a masterful and forthright job of assembling a varied group of polemics that assess Howe's intellectual prowess, his moral strength, and his occasional lapses. But more importantly, in doing so, he sheds fresh light on problems that, in an age in which events have once again raised pressing questions about the intellectual's relationship to the state, are as germane as they were during the 1930s."-Michael Tomasky, editor of the American Prospect "John Rodden shows that Irving Howe 'disturbed' American political discourse and letters in the last, foul century by making public discussion more humane. He refused to let readers, listeners, and, yes, followers rush into unthinking 'solidarities' or withdraw into self-cultivation. Rodden strikes that civic-republican balance in ways I think Howe would have admired."-Jim Sleeper, author of The Closest of Strangers and Liberal Racism "Through his appreciations of Yiddish, Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Jewish immigration, the Holocaust, socialism, and European letters, Irving Howe sought to elucidate the ways in which fiction surveyed the ideological tides of the 20th century. John Rodden applies his proven skills as editor and scholar of George Orwell and Lionel Trilling to measure his reach."-Ilan Stavans, author of On Borrowed Words and editor of The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature