Philip Rahv

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Philip Rahv (March 10, 1908 – December 22, 1973) was an American literary critic and essayist. He was Ukrainian-born (in Kupin) and Jewish, firstly called Ivan Greenberg; he made his way to the USA via Palestine, and worked as a teacher of Hebrew.

He joined the American Communist Party in 1932. He is noted for his role in founding Partisan Review, with William Phillips, in 1933. The journal broke with the Soviet line in 1937, in the wake of the Moscow Trials and on-going feuds with Stalinist Popular Front advocates like Granville Hicks of New Masses. As an independent publication, Partisan Review went on to become the most influential literary journal of the period.

His work at Partisan Review put Rahv at the center of an intellectual circle that included Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Alfred Kazin, Delmore Schwartz, Sidney Hook, and many other prominent intellectuals of the period. Rahv remained a Marxist and was committed to the idea of achieving a synthesis of radical social criticism and literary excellence.

He is also known for his later hostility to myth-criticism, in the style of Northrop Frye. As he put it "what the craze for myth represents most of all is the fear of history."

Rahv taught at Brandeis University in his later years, and died in Cambridge, MA in 1973 in what appears to be a suicide .