Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent - Softcover

Sorin, Gerald

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814740200 ISBN 13: 9780814740200

Publisher: NYU Press, 2005

Synopsis

An illuminating biography of an American intellectual and one of the century's most important public thinkers whose commitment to social reform was balanced by his love of fiction, poetry, baseball, and music.

About this title

Review:

"Sorin does a solid and convincing job of chronicling Howe's life and times."
-The Jewish Quarterly Review

"Irving Howe"s career, with its constantly shifting strands of political activism, literary commentary, and accessible Jewish scholarship, makes a great subject for an intellectual biography. Painstakingly researched and fluently written, Gerald Sorin's book strikes just the right balance between sympathetic identification and critical distance. Making excellent use of interviews, memoirs, and unpublished letters, Sorin recreates the many significant issues that engaged Howe. He brings considerable drama to Howe's gradual break with Marxist sectarianism, his shifting perspectives on socialism, his momentous reconnection to Jewish culture, his battles with the New Left, and the literary controversies that accompanied his steady growth as a subtle reader and vigorous, penetrating critic."
-Morris Dickstein, author, Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties

"Gerald Sorin has written a lively and compelling biography of Irving Howe. A New York intellectual, Howe figured in most of the major and many of the minor debates of mid-twentieth-century America: socialism, modernism, Yiddish culture, civil rights, the new politics of postwar America, and the antiwar movement of the turbulent sixties. Howe spoke out forcefully and fearlessly, carving a place for intellectuals with moral vision. Sorin"s first biography deftly captures the complexity of the man and his eras."
-Deborah Dash Moore, author of To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A.

"Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent offers such an intellectually detailed and conceptually animated account of Howe's work. Sorin did an excellent job."
-Magill's Literary Annual

"What Sorin has accomplished in this beautifully written, balanced and probing intellectual biography is the most complete picture we have of Howe, a portrait of how one Jewish intellectual and activist struggled daily to balance scholarship and politics and the life of the mind and a life of action. . . . Sorin has ably captured the life and passion of this most unusual man, whose commitment to democracy is a legacy still worth cherishing."
-LA Times

Synopsis:

Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Irving Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe, Gerald Sorin gives shape to one of the most provocative thinkers of our time.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0814740200
• ISBN 13: 9780814740200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 418