In the early 1930’s in a small alcove at City College in New York a group of young, passionate, and politically radical students argued for hours about the finer points of Marxist doctrine, the true nature of socialism, and whether or not Stalin or Trotsky was the true heir to Lenin. These young intellectuals went on to write for and found some of the most well known political and literary journals of the 20th century such as The Masses, Politics, Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary, Dissent and The Public Interest. Figures such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, and Seymour Lipset penned some of the most important books of social science in the mid-twentieth century. They believed, above all else, in the importance of argument and the power of the pen. They were a vibrant group of engaged political thinkers and writers, but most importantly they were public intellectuals committed to addressing the most important political, social and cultural questions of the day. Here, with helpful head notes and a comprehensive introduction by Neil Jumonville, The New York Intellectuals Reader brings the work of these thinkers back into conversation.

In the early 1930’s in a small alcove at City College in New York a group of young, passionate, and politically radical students argued for hours about the finer points of Marxist doctrine, the true nature of socialism, and whether or not Stalin or Trotsky was the true heir to Lenin. These young intellectuals went on to write for and found some of the most well known political and literary journals of the 20th century such as The Masses, Politics, Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary, Dissent and The Public Interest. Figures such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, and Seymour Lipset penned some of the most important books of social science in the mid-twentieth century. They believed, above all else, in the importance of argument and the power of the pen. They were a vibrant group of engaged political thinkers and writers, but most importantly they were public intellectuals committed to addressing the most important political, social and cultural questions of the day. Here, with helpful head notes and a comprehensive introduction by Neil Jumonville, The New York Intellectuals Reader brings the work of these thinkers back into conversation.

From Lionel Trilling to Irving Kristol, from Philip Rahv to Norman Podhoretz, this book offers a comprehensive look at New York intellectual life over the past half-century. Bloom traces the rise of the New York intellectuals from their origins--poor, Jewish, the children of immigrants--to their coming to prominence in our intellectual estalishment. It takes us through nearly all the crucial intellectual and political events of the last decades and behind the scenes at such important journals as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The Public Interest.

From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Petain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France's floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, during one of the most vexed periods in French history."--BOOK JACKET.

Reconstructs the history of a group of thinkers and activists including Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, and Lionel Trilling--collectively known as the New York Intellectuals--during the period of their greatest influence, the 1940s and 1950s. While defending the group against charges that they "sold out", the author analyzes the contradictions between their avant-garde principles and the institutional locations they came to occupy. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A controversial memoir about American intellectual life and academia and the relationship between politics, money, and education. Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia University on a scholarship, and later received degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Making It is his blistering account of fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally of his induction into the ranks of what he calls “the Family,” the small group of left-wing and largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions came to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene in the fifties and sixties. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still-pertinent analysis of the tense and more than a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power. The Family responded to the book with outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he remains to this day. Fifty years after its first publication, this controversial and legendary book remains a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life.

Combining literary biography with astute reporting and moral insight, David Laskin shows how sex, politics, and art affected relationships among the Partisan Review writers: Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Diana Trilling. It is the women who steal the show with their their groundbreaking work, their harrowing experiences of marriage, abuse, and betrayal, their passion for writing and disdain for feminism, their struggles and achievements.

This text is a study of how a number of important 20th century European intellectuals came to support tyrannical regimes and totalitarian political ideas.

Intellectual biography of Holocaust historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz. From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915–1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz’s rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz’s life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life.

New York Intellect is Thomas Bender's remarkable look at the connections between the life of a city and the life of the mind. New York has never been comfortable or convenient as a milieu for art and intellect, Bender notes. Yet New Yorkers have always struggled to create institutions and styles of thought and writing that reflect the special character of the city, its boundless energies and deep divisions.