Irving Howe (né Horenstein; ; June 11, 1920 – May 5, 1993) was an American author, literary and social critic, and a key figure in the democratic socialist movement in the U.S. He co-founded and served as longtime editor of Dissent magazine. In 1976, he wrote the National Book Award-winning World of Our Fathers, a history of East European Jews who immigrated to America.

Early life and career

Howe was born Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York in 1920. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie (née Goldman) and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. Irving's father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.

Irving attended DeWitt Clinton High School in northwest Bronx, where he was already a left-wing activist. He then matriculated to City College of New York (CCNY) in 1936. He graduated alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol in 1940. While in college, he was constantly debating socialism, Stalinism, fascism, and the meaning of Judaism.

During World War II, Howe served four years in the U.S. Army, stationed mostly at Fort Richardson near Anchorage, Alaska. Upon his return to New York, he began writing literary and cultural criticism for Partisan Review and was a frequent essayist for Commentary, Politics, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. He then worked for several years as one of the resident book reviewers for Time magazine. In 1954, he co-founded the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death.

At the request of his friend Michael Harrington, Howe helped form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) in the early 1970s and served on its national board. After DSOC merged into the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in 1982, Howe became an Honorary Chair of the DSA.

He was a vociferous opponent of both Soviet totalitarianism and McCarthyism. He called into question standard Marxist doctrine, and came into conflict with the New Left after he criticized their brand of radicalism. World of Our Fathers reached #1 on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction in April 1976. The following year it won the National Book Award in History, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award in the History category.

Howe edited and translated many Yiddish stories and commissioned the first English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer for Partisan Review.

In 1987, Howe was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Personal life and death

After marriages to Anna Bader, Thalia Phillies, and Arien Mack ended in divorce, Howe married Ilana Wiener, who co-edited the anthology Short Shorts with him. From his marriage to Phillies, a classicist, he had two children, Nina and Nicholas (1953–2006).

Howe died from cardiovascular disease at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan on May 5, 1993, at the age of 72.

Legacy

Howe had strong political views that he would ferociously defend. Morris Dickstein, a professor at Queens College, referred to him as a "counterpuncher who tended to dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy of the moment, whether left or right, though he himself was certainly a man of the left."

Edited

  • Gissing, George. New Grub Street. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
  • Poverty: Views from the Left, co-edited with Jeremy Larner. New York: Apollo, 1962.
  • The Basic Writings of Trotsky. New York: Random House, 1963.
  • The Radical Papers. New York: Doubleday, 1966.
  • Shoptalk: An Instructor's Manual for Classics of Modern Fiction: Eight Short Novels. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
  • Beyond the New Left. New York: McCall Publishing Co., 1970.
  • The New Conservatives: A Critique From the Left, co-edited with Lewis A. Coser. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1974.
  • Yiddish Stories: Old and New, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg. New York: Avon Books, 1977.
  • The Best of Sholem Aleichem, co-edited with Ruth R. Wisse. Washington: New Republic Books, 1979.
  • How We Lived: A Documentary History of Immigrant Jews in America, 1880-1930, co-edited with Kenneth Libo. New York: R. Marek, 1979.
  • The Portable Kipling. New York: Viking Press, 1982.
  • Beyond the Welfare State. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.
  • Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, co-edited with Ilana Wiener Howe. Boston, MA: D.R. Godine, 1982.
  • 1984 Revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Contributed

  • "Introduction". New Grub Street, by George Gissing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
  • "Notes on the Welfare State". Poverty: Views from the Left, co-edited with Jeremy Larner. New York: Apollo, 1962, pp. 293–314.
  • "Introduction". The Basic Writings of Trotsky, edited by Irving Howe. New York: Random House, 1963.
  • "Afterword". An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser. New York: Signet Classic, 1964.
  • "Are American Jews Turning to the Right?" The New Conservatives: A Critique From the Left, edited by Daniel Bell & Lewis A. Coser. New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times Book Co., 1974.
  • "Introduction". Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories, co-edited with Ilana Wiener Howe. Boston, MA: D.R. Godine, 1982.

Translated

  • Baeck, Leo. The Essence of Judaism, translated by Irving Howe and Victor Grubwieser. New York: Schocken Books, 1948.

Articles and introductions

  • A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Viking Press, 1954.
  • Modern literary criticism: An anthology, editor, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
  • "New York in the Thirties: Some Fragments of Memory," Dissent, vol.8, no.3 (Summer 1961), pp. 241–250.
  • The Historical Novel by Georg Lukacs, preface by Irving Howe, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963
  • Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism, editor, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963. (Second edition 1982)
  • The Merry-Go-Round of Love and selected stories by Luigi Pirandello, trans. Frances Keene and Lily Duplaix, with a foreword by Irving Howe, New York: The New American Library of World Literature, 1964.
  • Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, edited with an introduction by Irving Howe, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
  • Selected writings: stories, poems and essays by Thomas Hardy, edited with an introduction by Irving Howe, Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1966.
  • Selected short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, edited with an introduction by Irving Howe, New York: Modern Library, 1966.
  • The Radical Imagination: An Anthology from Dissent Magazine, editor, New York: New American Library, 1967.
  • A Dissenter's Guide to Foreign Policy, editor, New York: Praeger, 1968.
  • Classics of modern fiction; eight short novels, editor, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.
  • A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969.
  • Essential works of socialism, editor, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
  • The Literature of America: Nineteenth Century, editor, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970.
  • Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, co-edited with Carl Gershman, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1970.
  • Voices from the Yiddish: Essays, Memoirs, Diaries, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972.
  • The Seventies: Problems and Proposals, co-edited with Michael Harrington, New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
  • The World of the Blue-Collar Worker, editor, New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972.
  • Yiddish stories, old and new, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Holiday House, 1974.
  • Herzog: Text and Criticism by Saul Bellow, editor, New York: Viking Press, 1976.
  • Jewish-American stories, editor, New York: New American Library, 1977.
  • Ashes Out of Hope: Fiction by Soviet-Yiddish writers, co-edited with Eliezer Greenberg, New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
  • Literature as Experience: An Anthology, co-edited with John Hollander and David Bromwich, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979.
  • Twenty-five years of Dissent: An American tradition, compiled and with an introduction by Irving Howe, New York: Methuen, 1979.
  • 1984 revisited: Totalitarianism in Our Century, editor, New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
  • Alternatives, proposals for America from the democratic left, editor, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.
  • We lived there, too: in their own words and pictures—pioneer Jews and the westward movement of America, 1630-1930, editor with Kenneth Libo, New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1984.
  • The Penguin book of modern Yiddish verse, co-edited with Ruth Wisse and Chone Shmeruk, New York: Viking Press, 1987.
  • Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, introduction, New York: Bantam, 1990.
  • The Castle by Franz Kafka, introduction, London: David Campbell Publishers, 1992.
  • Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, introduction, London: David Campbell Publishers, 1992.

References