The New York Intellectuals

The New York Intellectuals were a predominantly Jewish group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and Socialism while rejecting Soviet Communism as a workable or acceptable political model.

Overview

Many New York Intellectuals were educated at the City College of New York ("Harvard of the Proletariat" ) and Columbia University in the 1930s, and associated with the left-wing political journals The Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Writer Nicholas Lemann has described the New York Intellectuals as "the American Bloomsbury".

Writers often identified as New York Intellectuals include Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Delmore Schwartz, William Barrett, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Richard Hofstadter, Harvey Swados, Richard Chase, Saul Bellow, Isaac Rosenfeld, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Robert Warshow, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Norman Podhoretz, Susan Sontag, Marshall Berman, and Michael Walzer. Some of the New York Intellectuals taught at The New School, Columbia, Harvard, and University of California, Berkeley, and some, including Irving Kristol, Sidney Hook, and Norman Podhoretz later became key activists in the Neoconservative movement.

References

• The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, by Alan M. Wald, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, ISBN 0-8078-4169-2
• Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals by David Laskin, University of Chicago Press, 2001, ISBN 0-226-46893-3
• Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America by Neil Jumonville, University of California Press, 1991, ISBN 0-520-06858-0

External links

• Lives of the New York intellectuals by Robert Fulford in The Globe & Mail
• The Failure of the New York Intellectuals by Daniel Silliman in Comment
• Arguing the World, the PBS documentary
• Partisan Review
• Dissent
• A comic book project about the New York Intellectuals (French)