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Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent, by Gerald Sorin
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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.
- Sales Rank: #4430082 in Books
- Brand: Brand: NYU Press
- Published on: 2005-04-01
- Released on: 2005-04-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.04" w x 6.00" l, 1.15 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 386 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Irving Howe's 1976 The World of Our Fathers-a bestselling masterpiece of cultural history, as well as an "implicitly autobiographical" work-has become a classic of Jewish-American history and secured Howe a prominent place in American letters, even while many of his other major works-a 1951 literary study Sherwood Anderson, or his 1957 Politics and the Novel-now go unread. Howe's life and career are emblematic of many Jewish intellectuals of his time. He was born in 1920 and raised in the crushing poverty of the Depression; both of his parents worked long days for low wages in the garment industry. Howe's family instilled in him an intellectual life and the "quest for absolute perfection." Howe early joined the Young People's Socialist League, and his involvement with the heady intellectual political atmosphere at City College of New York prepared him for his later published work in Commentary and Partisan Review in the 1940s, his founding of Dissent in the 1950s and his influential career as a critic and political commentator. Sorin is primarily interested in Howe's intellectual and political life. And while he does include some words critical of Howe-such as a critique of Howe's famous attack on Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, in which his subject called the author a "female impersonator"-Sorin's tone is overwhelmingly adulatory, even fawning. While Sorin did interview nearly 50 informants, much of the material comes from Howe's autobiographical writings. This is an important first step in re-examining a major intellectual and should serve as a springboard for more in-depth and balanced evaluations. Photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
An ardent and controversial advocate for liberalism and literature, distinguished professor and prolific writer Howe died in 1993 at age 73. Historian Sorin, Howe's first biographer, skillfully captures the illuminating fire of Howe's convictions, conflicts, and achievements, even though he's had to work without the benefit of Howe's family's personal reminiscences or private papers. But memories of Howe remain fresh, and Howe's vast and vital oeuvre (he wrote insightfully and boldly about socialism, Yiddish literature, Faulkner, Hardy, T. E. Lawrence, and, in his most famous book, World of Our Fathers [1976], the immigrant Jewish experience) and extensive documentation of his 40-year term as editor of the journal Dissent provide a wealth of compelling material. Sorin's deep understanding of Howe's belief in intelligent public discourse, "staunch and consistent defense of civil liberties," seminal perception of secular Jewishness as a commitment to social justice, and deep reverence for literature enables him not only to portray a great intellectual but also to encapsulate a key era in American politics and critical thought and explicate the role "passionate dissent" plays in a healthy democracy. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe's life and times.”
-The Jewish Quarterly Review
“Irving Howe”s 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 Sorin’s 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 Howe’s 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.”
-Morris Dickstein,author, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
“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. Sorin“s first biography deftly captures the complexity of the man and his eras.”
-Deborah Dash Moore,author of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.
“Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent offers such an intellectually detailed and conceptually animated account of Howe’s work. Sorin did an excellent job.”
-Magill's Literary Annual
“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.”
-LA Times
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will
By N. J. Peters
Irving Howe was a 20th century Renaissance man who wrote with conviction and intelligence on three different areas: politics, literature, and Jewish culture. Although he made a living as a college professor for much of his life, most of his diverse and voluminous publications were meant for people outside academia. Howe is perhaps best known as the author of World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made, but he was also an editor of and contributor to the journal Dissent for many years, as well as the author of a number of books of literary criticism.
Howe was a socialist. In his youth, he was a Trotskyist, and like many people, his politics became more moderate as he matured. But unlike many others from his generation of leftwing activists - some of whom were supporters of Stalin in their youth and then extreme conservatives later on - Howe remained a firm believer in democratic socialism throughout his adult life. This is not to say that his basic consistency always led him to what seem in retrospect to have been good opinions. In this regard, author Gerald Sorin gives us Irving Howe, warts and all (pardon the cliche). For example, before and even during World War II, Howe viewed that conflict as not much more than a battle between imperialist powers. Howe also fought long and hard with the New Left activists during the 60s - while some 60s radicals probably did think they were the first people to notice that there are problems in America, Howe's response to their arrogance left a lot to be desired. Howe also didn't exactly see the import of the women's movement in its early years. To his credit though, Howe eventually came around somewhat on feminism and was also an early and vocal supporter of the civil rights movement.
Just ten years after his death, many of the socialist ideas and ideals that Irving Howe wrote about seem to have been inspired by convictions that are anachronistic in today's world. Gerald Sorin does a terrific job conjuring up Howe and his world in a way that makes you hopeful that democratic socialism is still something that might just work, if it were given half a chance. Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent is a fine biography of a thoughtful man who believed that the world could be a better, more just place for all people.
4 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
The Retreat of the "Greatest Generation" Intellectuals
By Alfred Johnson
The last time we heard the name of the subject of this biography, Irving Howe, in this space it was as a (well paid) cameo performer and resident literary expert in Woody Allen's comedic send up of mass culture, Zelig. If Woody Allen is regarded as the consummate New Yorker, then Irving Howe, for better or worst and I think for the worst, represented the consummate post- World War II New York intellectual. Furthermore, as detailed here Howe came to see himself, as reflected in various shifts in his literary work and his politics, as a New York Jewish intellectual. (The Jewish intellectual aspect of this biography is a little beyond the scope of what I want to review here but should be mentioned as it is a central theme of Professor Sorin's work).
Moreover, as a perusal of this sympathetic, sometimes overly sympathetic, biography will reveal, as if to add insult to injury, this long time and well known editor of the social democratic journal Dissent fancied himself a New York socialist intellectual, as well. And that is the rub. As I will argue below Howe and his `greatest generation' cohort of public intellectuals did more than their fair share of muddying the political waters as people of my generation, the generation of '68, tried to make political sense of the world. And tried to change it for the better, despite the best efforts of Howe and his crowd to make peace, for the nth time, with bourgeois society.
I have mentioned in a review of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) leader James P. Cannon's The Struggle for the Proletarian Party, a book about the faction fight over defense of the Soviet Union and the organizational norms of a Bolshevik party in 1939-40, found elsewhere in this space that I have long questioned the wisdom of the entry tactic into the American Socialist Party by those forces who followed Leon Trotsky in the 1930's. Irving Howe is an individual case study that points out, in bold relief, the impetus behind that questioning.
Howe, born of poor New York Jewish immigrant parents in 1920, came of political age in the 1930's as he gravitated toward the leftward moving Socialist Party in high school and later at that hotbed of 1930's radicalism, City College of New York. As a result of the Trotskyist entry (as an organization then called the Workers Party) into the Socialist party they were able to pull out a significant portion of the Socialist Party's youth group, including Howe, when they were expelled from that party in 1938. This cohort of, mainly, young New York socialists thereafter formed a key component of the anti-Soviet defensist opposition led by Max Shachtman that split from the main body of Trotskyism, The SWP, in 1940. From there on, especially in the post World War II period with the onrush of the Cold War, these `third camp' socialists made their peace, quietly or by a warm embrace, with American imperialism.
The bulk of Howe's intellectual career, as a niche magazine editor and professor at various top-notch universities, thus was spent explaining the ways of god to man, oops, American imperialism to newly minted graduate students. So, not only does Professor Howe serve here as a whipping boy for the errors of the 1930's Trotskyists but also as a prima facie case of what happens when one's theoretical baggage breaks away from a hard materialist conception of history. Therefore, by the time that my generation was ready to `storm heaven' in the 1960's we dismissed Howe and his intellectuals in retreat out of hand.
Professor Sorin does a very good and thorough job of describing the tensions between Howe's branch of the Old Left and the various components of the New Left as each group squared off against the other in the Sixties. Sorin gives, as could be expected from his sympathies, his protagonist Howe much the best of it. For our part, we of the New Left may have made every political mistake in the book due to more than our share of naiveté and overzealousness but we had a better sense than Howe and his ilk of how irrational the forces that we opposed (and still oppose) really were. But read the biography and make your own decision on that.
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