ABSTRACT
The leading literary critics among the first-generation New York Intellectuals were born around World War I, came into association mainly through the Partisan Review in the late 1930s, and maintained a distinctive critical project into the early 1970s. The heyday of the School lasted from the late 1930s up until roughly the mid-1950s. The most important figures included Richard Chase, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, and Lionel Trilling. Edmund Wilson, older by more than a decade, served as a model for the School. Other noteworthy writers associated with the Intellectuals were Lionel Abel, William Barrett, F. W. Dupee, the early Leslie Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Clement Greenberg, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sidney Hook, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Steven Marcus, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Richard Poirier, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Meyer Schapiro, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag, Diana Trilling (wife of Lionel Trilling), William Troy, and Robert Warshow. Because many of the New York Intellectuals were Jewish (usually secularized), the group was sometimes characterized by outsiders and insiders alike as a Jewish clique. A large percentage of these critics started out as radical literary journalists-who wrote early on for Partisan Review, The New Republic, and The Nation, and later for Commentary, Dissent, and The New York Review of Books-and ended up as respected university professors who continued practicing literary journalism rather than academic scholarship. Their favorite genres were the critical review and the essay; their books typically consisted of collected short pieces. Many of them took to writing memoirs in later years. Early and late, the New York Intellectuals maintained a critical, often distrustful view of both the academy and bourgeois culture. In his incisive history of these critics, entitled “The New York Intellectuals”
(1968), Irving Howe assessed three decades of achievement, isolating for attention a dozen or so distinguishing traits of these writers. They felt a sense of apartness from society; they were radicals and democratic (not revolutionary) socialists opposed to Stalinism and Soviet totalitarian communism; they enjoyed polemics and sought self-consciously to be brilliant; they focused
on post-Enlightenment European culture and on post-Romantic American culture; they came late but enthusiastically to avant-garde literary modernism as well as to Marxist theory; in literature they prized complexity, coherence, irony, rationality, ambiguity, seriousness, intelligence, and liberal values; they self-consciously, often programmatically, united cosmopolitan culture and radical politics; they wrote criticism with a strong social-moral emphasis; they took Edmund Wilson’s work of the 1920s and 1930s as a model; they disliked parochial academic scholarship; they assaulted mass culture (like the Frankfurt School); they were Jews by birth or osmosis and often promoted Jewish literature; they aspired to lead the nation but were, in fact, a regional group; they became, in the early postwar or “Cold War” period, liberals, sometimes renouncing socialism; and they strongly opposed postmodernism and the new left.1
