Irving Howe

Irving Howe

Howe during his year as writer in residence at University of Michigan, 1967-1968
Born Irving Horenstein
(1920-06-11)June 11, 1920
The Bronx, New York, U.S.
Died May 5, 1993(1993-05-05) (aged 72)
Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Occupation Writer, public intellectual
Nationality American

Irving Howe (/haʊ/; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was a Jewish American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Early years

Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie (née Goldman) and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression.[1] His father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.[2]

Howe attended City College (CCNY) and graduated in 1940,[2] alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol; by the summer of 1940 he had changed his name to Howe for political (as distinct from official) purposes.[3] While at school he was constantly debating socialism, Stalinism, fascism, and the meaning of Judaism. 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.[2] In the 1950s Howe taught English and Yiddish literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. He used the Howe and Greenberg Treasury of Yiddish Stories as the text for a course on the Yiddish story at a time when few were spreading knowledge or appreciation of these works in American colleges and universities.

Political career

Since his CCNY days, Howe was committed to left-wing politics. He was a committed democratic socialist throughout his life. He was a member of the Young People's Socialist League and then Max Shachtman's Workers Party. In 1948, he joined the Independent Socialist League where he was a key leader. He left this movement in the early 1950s. At 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 Dissent. Throughout his life he was attacked and challenged due to his socialist beliefs. He has had a few famous run-ins with people. In the 1960s while at Stanford University he was verbally attacked by a young radical socialist who claimed that Howe was no longer committed to the revolution and that he had become status quo. Howe turned to the student and said "You know what you're going to be? You're going to be a dentist."[2]

Career as writer

Known for literary criticism as well social and political activism, Howe wrote critical biographies on Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson, a book-length examination of the relation of politics to fiction, and theoretical essays on Modernism, the nature of fiction, and Social Darwinism, Ha was also among the first to reexaminee the work of Edwin Arlington Robinson and lead the way to establishing Robinson's reputation as one of the twentieth century's great poets. Through his writing he was able to portray his dislike of capitalist America.

Irving Howe has written many influential books throughout his career. He wrote the Decline of the New, The World Of Our Fathers, Politics and the Novel and his autobiography A Margin of Hope. He also wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky, the Russian revolutionary who was one of his childhood heroes.

Howe's exhaustive, multi-disciplinary history of Eastern European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, is considered a classic of social analysis and general scholarship. Howe explores the socialist Jewish New York he came from. He examines the dynamic of Eastern European Jews and the culture that they created in America. World of Our Fathers won the 1977 National Book Award in History.[4] He also edited and translated many Yiddish stories, and commissioned the first English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer for the Partisan Review.[2] He also wrote Socialism and America. In 1987, Howe was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Death and legacy

He died on May 5, 1993 in New York. According to the Sinai Hospital, the cause of death was cardiovascular disease.[2]

He had strong political views that he would ferociously defend. Morris Dickstein, a professor at Queens College referred to Howe as a "counterpuncher who tended to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy of the moment, whether left or right, though he himself was certainly a man of the left."[2]

Leon Wieseltier, who was the literary editor of The New Republic, said of Howe: "He lived in three worlds, literary, political and Jewish, and he watched all of them change almost beyond recognition."[2]

Howe had two children, Nina and the late Nicholas (1953-2006), with his second wife, Thalia Phillies, a classicist.[5]

He is survived by his 3rd wife Ilona Howe.

Works

Books and pamphlets

Articles, introductions, translations

References

  1. ↑ Rodden, John and Goffman, Ethan (2010). "Chronology". Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations With Irving Howe. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. ISBN 9781557535511. Pg. xv.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Bernstein, Richard (May 6, 1993). "Irving Howe, 72, Critic, Editor and Socialist, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved 2012-01-27.
  3. ↑ Edward Alexander, Irving Howe - Socialist, Critic, Jew (Indiana University Press, 1998; ISBN 0253113210), p. 10.
  4. ↑ "National Book Awards – 1977". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-17.
  5. ↑ "In Memoriam: Nicholas Howe". University of California. 2006. Retrieved 2013-01-12.

Further reading

Primary sources

External links

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