Presented here is a compilation of Irving Howe's interviews during the last fifteen years of his life that could be viewed as the sequel to his intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope. Many of these interviews were never published. Others were originally published in such venues as The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the PBS documentary Arguing the World. Howe never organized his thoughts about the great renown of the last fifteen years of his life, during which he had resounding success with World of Our Fathers, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and became widely regarded as the leading left-liberal intellectual in the United States and, arguably, the leading literary critic in America. During this time, Howe also struggled to redefine the American Left in an environment that discounted and marginalized it. These interviews may have particular significance today, a period of new opportunities for the liberal Left, yet one in which it struggles to construct some coherent identity and program.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction. Affirming Dissent, or Irving Howe in His Interviews
1 William Novak, “The Lost Worlds of Our Fathers and of Yiddish Literature,” Moment, March 1976, 24-27.
2 Sol Stern, “Israel, American Jews, and the Peace Now Camp,” Jerusalem Post Weekly, 24 August 1976.
3 Sandra Greenberg, “Fiction, Society, and the Literary Critic,” Book Forum: An International Transdisciplinary Quarterly, 1981, 534-40.
4 Maurice Isserman, “Dissent in the Fifties and Sixties,” 24 January 1982; 21 October 1982 (unpublished transcripts).
5 Grace Schulman, “A Margin of Hope at the 92nd Street Y,” 7 November 1983 (unpublished audiotape).
6 Stephen Lewis, “From the Thirties to the Rise of Neoconservatism: Politics and Intellectual Life Across a Half-Century,” Radio Interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Toronto, December 1983.
7 Editorial Board of The New York Times, “Howe and Harrington on the Future of Democratic Socialism Beyond the Reagan Era,” New York Times Magazine, 17 June 1984, 24.
8 John Rodden, “A ‘Partisan’ View of Orwell,” October 1983 and April 1987 (unpublished transcript).
9 Todd Gitlin, “Looking Back on the New Left and the Counterculture,” 15 April 1985 (unpublished audiotape).
10 Neil Jumonville, “Socialism, Communism, and the New York Intellectuals,” 6 June 1985 (unpublished transcript).
11 Susanne Klingenstein, “Thoughts on Jewish Intellectual Life and the American Academy,” 12 December 1988 (unpublished audiotape).
12 Irving Howe, “The First 35 Years Were the Hardest: Interview with Myself,” Dissent, Spring 1989, 133-36.
13 William Cain, “Making of a Modern Critic,” American Literary History, Fall 1989, 554-64.
14 Jim Holt, “‘Howe Now’: on Politics, Art, and the Critic,” Thesis: The Magazine of the Graduate School and University Center, Fall 1990, 4-11.
15 Robert Negin, “Fraternal Dissents on Max Shachtman and American Trotskyism,” November 1990 (unpublished audiotape).
16 Maurice Isserman, “‘My Recollections of Mike’: Harrington the Thinker and Socialist Activist,” 26 March 1991 (unpublished transcript).
17 Joseph Dorman, “Irving Howe, New York Intellectual,” Selections from Arguing the World (New York: The Free Press, 2000).
Postscript. Interview with Robert Silvers on the Death of Irving Howe, CBC Radio, “As It Happens,” May 5, 1993
Afterword by Nina Howe
Bibliography
Index
Photographs follow page