The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Alan M. Wald
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146963595X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

Get Book Here

Book Description
For a generation, Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition

The New York Intellectuals, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition PDF Author: Alan M. Wald
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 146963595X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

Get Book Here

Book Description
For a generation, Alan M. Wald's The New York Intellectuals has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States. His passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders who mostly became insiders retains its resonance today and includes commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.

The New York Intellectuals

The New York Intellectuals PDF Author: Hugh Wilford
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719039881
Category : Intellectuals
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reconstructs the history of a group of thinkers and activists including Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, and Lionel Trilling--collectively known as the New York Intellectuals--during the period of their greatest influence, the 1940s and 1950s. While defending the group against charges that they "sold out", the author analyzes the contradictions between their avant-garde principles and the institutional locations they came to occupy. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Critical Crossings

Critical Crossings PDF Author: Neil Jumonville
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520068582
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book Here

Book Description
"I did not think it was possible to say something new about the New York intellectuals. I was wrong. Jumonville takes a unique approach: he shows why their ideas mattered--and still do. This book rekindles one's faith in the intellectual enterprise."--Alan Wolfe, author of Whose Keeper? "So much has been written on the New York intellectuals they may someday attain the historiographical status of Perry Miller's Puritans and F. O. Matthiessen's Transcendentalists. Jumonville's excellent book demonstrates why the subject deserves fresh study. . . . Rises above ideological rancor to achieve empathy and thoughtful, judicious reflection."--John Patrick Diggins, author of The American Left in the Twentieth Century

Arguing the World

Arguing the World PDF Author: Joseph Dorman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226158143
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Joseph Dorman's film Arguing the World won New York Magazine's Best New York Documentary award in 1999 as well as the Peabody Award in 1999. His work has also appeared on The Discovery Channel, CBS, and CNN, and has been nominated for two Emmy Awards. Joseph Dorman's acclaimed documentary, Arguing the World, included stunning interviews with Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer. Now with a new preface, Dorman converted the film into this book that includes an overview of the New York Intellectuals and a chapter on the future of the public intellectual. Expertly spliced together from the film and new material, this book gives the sense that these men are still engaged in their fiery debates that targeted everything from the Depression to McCarthyism to the rise of the New Left through the Age of Reagan.

From Left to Right

From Left to Right PDF Author: Nancy Sinkoff
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
ISBN: 0814345115
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 454

Get Book Here

Book Description
Intellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.

Critical Crossings

Critical Crossings PDF Author: Neil Jumonville
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520371879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Get Book Here

Book Description
The period immediately following the Second World War was a time, observed Randall Jarrell, when many American writers looked to the art of criticism as the representative act of the intellectual. Rethinking this interval in our culture, Neil Jumonville focuses on the group of writers and thinkers who founded, edited, and wrote for some of the most influential magazines in the country, including Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary, and Dissent. In their rejection of ideological, visionary, and romantic outlooks, reviewers and essayists such as Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, and Daniel Bell adopted a pragmatic criticism that had a profound influence on the American intellectual community. By placing pragmatism at the center of intellectual activity, the New York Critics crossed from large belief systems to more tentative answers in the hope of redefining the proper function of the intellectual in the new postwar world. Because members of the New York group always valued being intellectuals more than being political leftists, they adopted a cultural elitism that opposed mass culture. Ready to combat any form of absolutist thought, they found themselves pitted against a series of antagonists, from the 1930s to the present, whom they considered insufficiently rational and analytical to be good intellectuals: the Communists and their sympathizers, the Beat writers, and the New Left. Jumonville tells the story of some of the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront all intellectuals. In this sense the book is as much about what it means to be an intellectual as it is about a specific group of thinkers. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Making It

Making It PDF Author: Norman Podhoretz
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681370816
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
A controversial memoir about American intellectual life and academia and the relationship between politics, money, and education. Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia University on a scholarship, and later received degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Making It is his blistering account of fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally of his induction into the ranks of what he calls “the Family,” the small group of left-wing and largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions came to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene in the fifties and sixties. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still-pertinent analysis of the tense and more than a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power. The Family responded to the book with outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he remains to this day. Fifty years after its first publication, this controversial and legendary book remains a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life.

Prodigal Sons

Prodigal Sons PDF Author: Alexander Bloom
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195051777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Lionel Trilling to Irving Kristol, from Philip Rahv to Norman Podhoretz, this book offers a comprehensive look at New York intellectual life over the past half-century. Bloom traces the rise of the New York intellectuals from their origins--poor, Jewish, the children of immigrants--to their coming to prominence in our intellectual estalishment. It takes us through nearly all the crucial intellectual and political events of the last decades and behind the scenes at such important journals as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Public Interest.

The Rise of the New York Intellectuals

The Rise of the New York Intellectuals PDF Author: Terry A. Cooney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book Here

Book Description


Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944

Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944 PDF Author: Jeffrey Mehlman
Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 634

Get Book Here

Book Description
Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism — Maurice Maeterlinck — came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism — André Breton — came to survive; and where French structuralism — Claude Lévi-Strauss — came to be born. From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Pétain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France’s floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, presenting a series of surprising and expertly etched portraits against the backdrop of an overriding irony: the United States, the world’s principal hope in the battle against Hitler’s barbarism, was for the most part more eager to deal with Pétain’s collaborationist regime than with what Secretary of State Cordell Hull called de Gaulle’s "so-called Free French" movement. “One of modern European history’s great stories. Jeffrey Mehlman tells the tale appealingly and persuasively... The individual stories — not least the symbolism of the ocean liner Normandie’s tragic burning and capsizing... — would be plenty to go on with, but Mr. Mehlman’s theme is a larger one. He finds the French intellectuals in World War II New York not very different from the French aristocrats who found refuge in Koblenz in the last decade of the 18th century, hoping for a reversal of the Revolution and restoration of the ancien regime.” — Colin Walters, Washington Times “Subtle, erudite, and often humorous. Previous attempts by literature professors to tackle culture have not always resulted in works as mind-stretching and entertaining as this account.” — Stanley Hoffman, Foreign Affairs “A series of elegant essays of cultural criticism.” — Kim Munholland, American Historical Review “Jeffrey Mehlman has written an intriguing, highly original work... [He] has succeeded in achieving a personal, yet erudite, series of insights about intellectual production of French writers and philosophers exiled in New York during the Second World War... Mehlman deftly and sometime humorously brings to life this motley cast of characters.” — Jonathan Gosnell, French Review “Mehlman’s insightful book on French exiles in wartime New York City enriches the understanding of how very diverse political exiles reacted to the traumatic suffering of their homelands and other countries occupied by the Nazis.” — Edmund J. Campion,Magill’s Literary Annual “Mehlman’s greatest achievement... is neither the history he’s opened up nor the reputations he’s reclaimed. It is the quality of the close reading that is most admirable, tracing words and themes as they echo and resonate from one text to another.” — David Herman, Jewish Quarterly “Mehlman has written a brilliant, original, and challenging work. There is quite simply no other work like it, because Mehlman works on two levels at once, historical and metaphysical. It should find an eager audience among scholars working in the fields of twentieth-century French literature, the history of French thought, and the history of France in World War II.” — Arthur Goldhammer, Center for European Studies,Harvard University