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Irving Howe

American writer, literary and social critic and socialist activist From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irving Howe

Irving Howe (né Horenstein; /haʊ/; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was an American author, literary and social critic, and a key figure in the democratic socialist movement in the U.S. He co-founded and served as longtime editor of Dissent magazine. In 1976, he wrote the National Book Award-winning World of Our Fathers, a history of East European Jews who immigrated to America.

Quick Facts Born, Died ...
Irving Howe
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Howe during his year as writer in residence at University of Michigan, 1967-1968
BornIrving Horenstein
(1920-06-11)June 11, 1920
New York City, U.S.
DiedMay 5, 1993(1993-05-05) (aged 72)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationWriter, public intellectual
Alma materCity College of New York
Notable worksWorld of Our Fathers (1976)
Spouse
  • Anna Bader
    ​
    (divorced)​
  • Thalia Phillies
    ​
    (divorced)​
  • Arien Mack
    ​
    (divorced)​
  • Ilana Wiener
Children2, including Nicholas
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Early life and career

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Howe was born Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York in 1920. 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] Irving's father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.[2][3]

Irving attended DeWitt Clinton High School in northwest Bronx, where he was already a left-wing activist.[4] He then matriculated to City College of New York (CCNY) in 1936.[5] He graduated alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in 1940.[2] By summer of that year, he had changed his surname from Horenstein to Howe for political (as distinct from official) purposes.[6] While in college, he was constantly debating socialism, Stalinism, fascism, and the meaning of Judaism.

During World War II, Howe served four years in the U.S. Army, stationed mostly at Fort Richardson near Anchorage, Alaska.[7] Upon his return to New York, he began writing literary and cultural criticism for Partisan Review and was a frequent essayist for Commentary, Politics, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books.[8] He then worked for several years as one of the resident book reviewers for Time magazine.[9] In 1954, he co-founded the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death.[2] In the 1950s, Howe taught English and Yiddish literature at Brandeis University. His anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954), co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, became a standard text in college courses.[10] Howe's research and translations of Yiddish literature occurred at a time when few were appreciating or spreading knowledge about it in American universities.

Political activist

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Since his high school and CCNY days, Howe was committed to left-wing politics. A professed democratic socialist throughout his life, he was a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL), joining it in the 1930s when it was under the influence of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party.[11] He remained with YPSL in 1940 when it became the youth organization of Max Shachtman's Workers Party, where Howe served in a leading capacity and for a while edited its paper, Labor Action. He continued his activist role in the Workers Party when it morphed into the Independent Socialist League in 1949.[12] He left the organization in 1952, deeming it too sectarian.[13]

At the request of his friend Michael Harrington, Howe helped form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) in the early 1970s and served on its national board. After DSOC merged into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982, Howe became an Honorary Chair of the DSA.[14]

He was a vociferous opponent of both Soviet totalitarianism and McCarthyism. He called into question standard Marxist doctrine, and came into conflict with the New Left after he criticized their brand of radicalism.[2] In later years, his socialist politics gravitated towards a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, a position he espoused in the pages of Dissent magazine.

He had a few famous run-ins with people on political matters. In 1969 while at Stanford University, he was verbally attacked by a group of young SDS radicals, who claimed that Howe was no longer committed to the revolution and had become status quo. Howe turned to the leader of the group and said, "You know what you're going to end up as? You're going to end up as a dentist!"[2][15]

Author, editor, translator

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Known for literary criticism as well as for his social and political activism, Howe wrote critical biographies of 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. He was among the first to reevaluate the works of Edwin Arlington Robinson and to help establish Robinson's reputation as a great 20th century poet.

Howe authored numerous books including Decline of the New, World of Our Fathers, Politics and the Novel, and his autobiography, A Margin of Hope. He also wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky, who was one of his childhood heroes. Howe's writing often expressed his disapproval of capitalist America.

His exhaustive multidisciplinary history of the Jewish immigrant experience, World of Our Fathers (1976), is considered a classic of social analysis and general scholarship. The book examines the dynamic of Eastern European Jews and the culture they created in New York. It explores the once-thriving Jewish socialism of the Lower East Side—the intellectual milieu from which Howe emerged.[16] World of Our Fathers reached #1 on The New York Times bestseller list for non-fiction in April 1976.[17] The following year it won the National Book Award in History,[18] the Francis Parkman Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award in the History category.[19]

Howe edited and translated many Yiddish stories and commissioned the first English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer for Partisan Review.[2] In his assessments of Jewish-American novelists, Howe was critical of Philip Roth's early works, Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint, as philistine and vulgar caricatures of Jewish life that pandered to the worst anti-Semitic stereotypes.

In 1987, Howe was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.[20]

Personal life and death

After marriages to Anna Bader, Thalia Phillies, and Arien Mack ended in divorce, Howe married Ilana Wiener, who co-edited the anthology Short Shorts with him. From his marriage to Phillies, a classicist, he had two children, Nina and Nicholas (1953-2006).[10][21][22]

Howe died from cardiovascular disease at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on May 5, 1993, at the age of 72.[2]

Legacy

Howe had strong political views that he would ferociously defend. Morris Dickstein, a professor at Queens College, referred to him 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, 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]

American philosopher Richard Rorty dedicated Achieving Our Country (1998)—a book about the development of 20th century American leftist thought—to Irving Howe's memory.

Howe appeared as himself in Woody Allen's mockumentary Zelig (1983).

Works

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Books

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Edited

Contributed

Translated

Articles and introductions

  • A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Viking Press, 1954.
  • Modern literary criticism: An anthology, editor, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
  • "New York in the Thirties: Some Fragments of Memory," Dissent, vol. 8, no. 3 (Summer 1961), pp. 241–250.
  • The Historical Novel by Georg Lukacs, preface by Irving Howe, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963
  • Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism, editor, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. (Second edition 1982)
  • The Merry-Go-Round of Love and selected stories by Luigi Pirandello, trans. Frances Keene and Lily Duplaix, with a foreword by Irving Howe, New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1964.
  • Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, edited with an introduction by Irving Howe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
  • Selected writings: stories, poems and essays by Thomas Hardy, edited with an introduction by Irving Howe, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1966.
  • Selected short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited with an introduction by Irving Howe, New York: Modern Library, 1966.
  • The Radical Imagination: An Anthology from Dissent Magazine, editor, New York: New American Library, 1967.
  • A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy, editor, New York: Praeger, 1968.
  • Classics of modern fiction; eight short novels, editor, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
  • A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.
  • Essential works of socialism, editor, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
  • The Literature of America: Nineteenth Century, editor, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
  • Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, co-edited with Carl Gershman, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1970.
  • Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
  • The Seventies: Problems and Proposals, co-edited with Michael Harrington, New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
  • The World of the Blue-Collar Worker, editor, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972.
  • Yiddish stories, old and new, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Holiday House, 1974.
  • Herzog: Text and Criticism by Saul Bellow, editor, New York: Viking Press, 1976.
  • Jewish-American stories, editor, New York: New American Library, 1977.
  • Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish writers, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
  • Literature as Experience: An Anthology, co-edited with John Hollander and David Bromwich, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
  • Twenty-five years of Dissent: An American tradition, compiled and with an introduction by Irving Howe, New York: Methuen, 1979.
  • 1984 revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, editor, New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
  • Alternatives, proposals for America from the democratic left, editor, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
  • We lived there, too: in their own words and pictures—pioneer Jews and the westward movement of America, 1630-1930, editor with Kenneth Libo, New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1984.
  • The Penguin book of modern Yiddish verse, co-edited with Ruth Wisse and Chone Shmeruk, New York: Viking Press, 1987.
  • Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, introduction, New York: Bantam, 1990.
  • The Castle by Franz Kafka, introduction, London: David Campbell Publishers, 1992.
  • Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, introduction, London: David Campbell Publishers, 1992.

References

Further reading

External links

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