Description: Irving Howe and the Critics is a selection of essays and reviews about the work of Irving Howe (1920-93), a vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation. Howe authored eighteen books, edited twenty-five more, wrote dozens of articles and reviews, and edited the magazine Dissent for forty years after founding it. His writings cover subjects ranging from U.S. labor to the vicissitudes of American communism and socialism to Yiddishkeit and contemporary politics. His book World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made received the National Book Award for Nonfiction. John Rodden has chosen essays and reviews that focus on Howe's major works and on the disputes they generated. He features both Dissent contributors and those who have dissented from the Dissenters--on the Right as well as the Left. Rodden includes a few stern assessments of Howe from his less sympathetic critics, testifying not only to the range of response--from admiration to hostility--that his work received but also to his stature on the Left as a prime intellectual target of neoconservative fire.
Review Quotes: "Tutored by the Old Left of the '30s, Irving Howe became the great educator of the New Left of the '60s, and John Rodden's valuable anthology shows his protégés carrying out their mentor's dedication to the integrity of intellect as a preface to politics."--John Diggins, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of The Rise and Fall of the American Left