ABSTRACT

The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur Schlesinger. The critical estimates of Howe's major books, collected here and framed by a major biographical introduction by John Rodden, constitute a sharply focused lens through which readers can re-evaluate the legacy of one of American's leading intellectuals and thereby understand the main issues of twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural history. Contributors: Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Newton Arvin, Charles Angoff, Edward Dahlberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Richard Chase, H.D. Lasswell, Dennis Wrong, Michael Harrington, Christopher Lasch, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Schlesinger, Theodore Solotaroff, Clive James, Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and William Phillips, among others.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction: The Worlds of Irving Howe

part I|63 pages

Labor Historian and Literary Biographer-Critic

chapter |8 pages

The UAW and Walter Reuther (1949)

chapter |24 pages

Sherwood Anderson (1951)

chapter |21 pages

William Faulkner (1952)

part II|66 pages

Editor-Translator, Literary Essayist, and Political Historian

chapter |9 pages

A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (1954)

chapter |10 pages

Politics and the Novel (1957)

chapter |22 pages

The American Communist Party (1958)

chapter |2 pages

Modern Literary Criticism (1959)

chapter |14 pages

A World More Attractive (1964)

part III|56 pages

Polemicist and Cultural Diagnostician

chapter |23 pages

Steady Work (1966)

chapter |6 pages

The Radical Imagination (1967)

chapter |2 pages

Thomas Hardy (1967)

chapter |13 pages

Decline of the New (1970)

chapter |3 pages

The Seventies (1973)

part IV|56 pages

Scholar-Critic and Autobiographer

chapter |23 pages

World of Our Fathers (1949)

chapter |20 pages

Leon Trotsky (1978)

chapter |5 pages

Celebrations and Attacks (1979)

part V|56 pages

Elegist and Memoirist

chapter |19 pages

A Margin of Hope (1982)

chapter |13 pages

Socialism and America (1985)

chapter |3 pages

The American Newness (1986)

chapter |16 pages

Selected Writings, 1950–1990 (1990)

part VI|23 pages

Posthumous Affirmations and Dissents

chapter 21|18 pages

Obituaries, Reassessments, and Memorials