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 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
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.