Irving Howe

Irving Howe 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.

Early life and career

Howe was born Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York in 1920. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. Irving's father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.
Irving attended DeWitt Clinton High School in northwest Bronx, where he was already a left-wing activist. He then matriculated to City College of New York in 1936. He graduated alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in 1940. By summer of that year, he had changed his surname from Horenstein to Howe for political purposes. 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. 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. He then worked for several years as one of the resident book reviewers for Time magazine. In 1954, he co-founded the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death. In the 1950s, Howe taught English and Yiddish literature at Brandeis University. His anthology A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, became a standard text in college courses. 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

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, joining it in the 1930s when it was under the influence of the Trotskyist Workers Party (United States)|Socialist Workers Party]. 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. He left the organization in 1952, deeming it too sectarian.
At the request of his friend Michael Harrington, Howe helped form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the early 1970s and served on its national board. After DSOC merged into the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, Howe became an Honorary Chair of the DSA.
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. 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!"

Author, editor, translator

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, 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. World of Our Fathers reached #1 on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction in April 1976. The following year it won the National Book Award in History, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award in the History category.
Howe edited and translated many Yiddish stories and commissioned the first English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer for Partisan Review. 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.

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

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."
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."
American philosopher Richard Rorty dedicated Achieving Our Country —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.

Works

Books

Authored

. New York: Workers Party Campaign Committee, 1946.
Long Island City, NY: Workers Party Publications, 1947. Printed for the Workers Party of the United States.
. Co-authored with B. J. Widick. New York: Random House, 1949.
. New York: Sloane, 1951.
. New York: Random House, 1952.
'. Co-authored with Lewis Coser, with the assistance of Julius Jacobson. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957.
. New York: Horizon Press, 1957.
The Jewish Labor Movement in America: Two Views. Co-authored with Israel Knox. New York: Jewish Labor Committee, 1957.
, editor. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.
T. E. Lawrence: The Problem of Heroism. The Hudson Review, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1962.
. New York: Horizon Press, 1963.
Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Washington, D.C.: Voice of America, 1964. American Novel Series #14
New Styles in "Leftism". New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1965.
On the Nature of Communism and Relations with Communists. New York: League for Industrial Democracy, 1966.
. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966.
. New York: Macmillan, 1967.
The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts. New York: Horizon Press, 1967.
Literary Modernism. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Publications, 1967.
Student Activism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967.
. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.
. Co-authored with Mark Schorer & Larzer Ziff. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.
. New York: Horizon Press, 1973.
. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.
New Perspectives: The Diaspora and Israel. Co-authored with Matityahu Peled. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976
. London: Fontana Modern Masters, 1978.
. New York: Viking Press, 1978
. New York: Horizon Press, 1979.
The Threat of Conservatism. Co-authored with Gus Tyler & Peter Steinfels. New York: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 1980.
The Making of a Critic, Bennington, VT: Bennington College, 1982. Ben Belitt lectureship series, #5.
. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.
. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
American Jews and Liberalism. Co-authored with Michael Walzer, Leonard Fein & Mitchell Cohen. New York: Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, 1986.
The Return of Terrorism. Bronx, NY: Lehman College of the City University of New York, 1989. Herbert H. Lehman memorial lecture, Lehman College publications, #22.
Selected Writings, 1950-1990 San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1990.
. Edited and introduced by Nicholas Howe. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.
"The End of Jewish Secularism". New York: Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1995. A lecture by Howe that became the first in a Hunter College series entitled .

Edited
Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
, co-edited with Jeremy Larner. New York: Apollo, 1962.
. New York: Random House, 1963.
The Radical Papers. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
Shoptalk: An Instructor's Manual for Classics of Modern Fiction: Eight Short Novels. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
. New York: McCall Publishing Co., 1970.
, co-edited with Lewis A. Coser. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1974.
, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg. New York: Avon Books, 1977.
, co-edited with Ruth R. Wisse. Washington: New Republic Books, 1979.
, co-edited with Kenneth Libo. New York: R. Marek, 1979.
. New York: Viking Press, 1982.
. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.
, co-edited with Ilana Wiener Howe. Boston, MA: D.R. Godine, 1982.
. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
Contributed
"Introduction". New Grub Street, by George Gissing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
, co-edited with Jeremy Larner. New York: Apollo, 1962, pp. 293–314.
"Introduction"., edited by Irving Howe. New York: Random House, 1963.
, by Theodore Dreiser. New York: Signet Classic, 1964.
, edited by Daniel Bell & Lewis A. Coser. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1974.
"Introduction"., co-edited with Ilana Wiener Howe. Boston, MA: D.R. Godine, 1982.
Translated'

Baeck, Leo. The Essence of Judaism'', translated by Irving Howe and Victor Grubwieser. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

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, pp. 241–250.
The Historical Novel by Georg Lukacs, preface by Irving Howe, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963
, editor, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963.
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.

Primary sources

Cain, William. American Literary History, Vol.1, No.3 : 554-564.
Howe, Irving. Politics and the Intellectual: Conversations with Irving Howe. Purdue University Press, 2010. Interviews during the previous fifteen years.
Libo, Kenneth. "My Work on World of Our Fathers". American Jewish History, Vol.88, No.4 : 439-448. . Memoir by his research assistant.
Rodden, John Irving Howe and the Critics: Celebrations and Attacks. University of Nebraska Press, 2005. Essays and reviews written by his critics.