Irving Howe


Irving Howe was an American literary and social critic and a prominent figure of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Early years

Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia, Nettie and David Horenstein, who ran a small grocery store that went out of business during the Great Depression. His father became a peddler and eventually a presser in a dress factory. His mother was an operator in the dress trade.
Howe attended City College of New York and graduated in 1940, alongside Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol; by the summer of 1940, he had changed his name to Howe for political purposes. While at school, he was constantly debating socialism, Stalinism, fascism, and the meaning of Judaism. He served in the US Army during World War II. Upon his return, he began writing literary and cultural criticism for the independent socialist Partisan Review and became a frequent essayist for Commentary, politics, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. In 1954, Howe helped found the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death in 1993. In the 1950s Howe taught English and Yiddish literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He used the Howe and Greenberg Treasury of Yiddish Stories as the text for a course on the Yiddish story, when few were spreading knowledge or appreciation of the works in American colleges and universities.

Political career

Since his City College days, Howe was committed to left-wing politics. He was a committed democratic socialist throughout his life. He was a member of the Young People's Socialist League, joining it in the 1930s when it was under the influence of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, remaining with YPSL when it became the youth organization of Max Shachtman's Workers Party in 1940, which he served in a leading capacity, for a time as the editor of its paper, Labor Action; he continued his activism with this political trend when it morphed into the Independent Socialist League 1949, but left this milieu later in the mid 1950s.
At the request of his friend, Michael Harrington, he helped cofound the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the early 1970s. DSOC merged into the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, with Howe a vice-chair.
He was a vociferous opponent of both Soviet totalitarianism and McCarthyism, called into question standard Marxist doctrine, and came into conflict with the New Left after he criticized their unmitigated radicalism. Later in life, his politics gravitated toward more pragmatic democratic socialism and foreign policy, a position still represented in Dissent.
He had a few famous run-ins with people. In the 1960s while at Stanford University, he was verbally attacked by a young radical socialist, who claimed Howe was no longer committed to the revolution and that he had become status quo. Howe turned to the student and said, "You know what you're going to be? You're going to be a dentist."

Writer

Known for literary criticism as well as social and political activism, Howe wrote critical biographies on Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson, a booklength examination of the relation of politics to fiction, and theoretical essays on Modernism, the nature of fiction, and social Darwinism.
He was also among the first to re-examine the work of Edwin Arlington Robinson and lead the way to establishing Robinson's reputation as one of the 20th century's great poets. His writing portrayed his dislike of capitalist America.
He wrote many influential books throughout his career, such as The Decline of the New, World of our Fathers, Politics and the Novel and his autobiography A Margin of Hope. He also wrote a biography of Leon Trotsky, who was one of his childhood heroes.
Howe's exhaustive multidisciplinary history of Eastern European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, is considered a classic of social analysis and general scholarship. Howe explores the socialist Jewish New York from which he came. He examines the dynamic of Eastern European Jews and the culture they created in America. World of our Fathers won the 1977 National Book Award in History and the National Jewish Book Award in the History category.
He also edited and translated many Yiddish stories and commissioned the first English translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer for the Partisan Review. In that regard, he was critical of Philip Roth's early works, Goodbye Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint, as philistine and vulgar caricatures of Jewish life that pandered to the worst anti-semitic stereotypes.
In 1987, Howe was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Death

He died in New York of cardiovascular disease.

Legacy

He had strong political views that he would ferociously defend. Morris Dickstein, a professor at Queens College referred to Howe 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."
Leon Wieseltier, who was the literary editor of The New Republic, said of Howe: "He lived in three worlds, literary, political and Jewish, and he watched all of them change almost beyond recognition."
And Richard Rorty, American philosopher of note, dedicated his well-known work, Achieving Our Country, to Howe's memory.
He appeared as himself in Woody Allen's mockumentary Zelig.
Howe had two children, Nina and Nicholas, with his second wife, Thalia Phillies, a classicist.
He is survived by his third wife, Ilona Howe.

Works

Books

Authored
Edited
Contributed
Translated