Abstract
Over the course of a very few decades, the New York Intellectuals went form being the intellectual community in U.S. cultural life to a historical coterie with little contemporary relevance. This article suggests some of the reasons for this evolution, both intellectual and personal.
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The New York Intellectuals have traditionally been divided into generations. The first generation came to prominence in the 1930s, around radical politics and the emergence of Partisan Review. Its members include Sidney Hook, Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Lionel Trilling, Diana Trilling, Meyer Schapiro, F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald, and Mary McCarthy. The “second” generation came of age in the 1930s, attracted to the non-Stalinist left and magazines like Partisan Review. They include Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Alfred Kazin, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Delmore Schwartz, Isaac Rosenfeld, Leslie Fiedler, Seymour Martin Lipset., and Saul Bellow, among others. The smaller “third” generation, came of age in the postwar years, and includes Norman Podhoretz, Steven Marcus, and Midge Decter, although individuals like Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag and even James Baldwin are often seen as connected to the community.
The initial spate of works on the New York Intellectuals include my own, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); as well as Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1935–1045 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Neil Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1987), and Hugh Wilford, The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution, (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995).
Kim Miller to me, [August xx, 2015] July 30, 2015
Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (Ne York: [: XXXX] Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1950), ix.
Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: [XXX] Houghton Mifflin, 1949) 159.
Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, 63.
Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 310
Ibid., 300.
Ibid., 310–311.
Norman Podhoretz, Making It (New York: Random House, 1967), 146–47.
Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 5.
Ibid., 359.
Ibid., 360.
Alfred Kazin, New York Jew (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 43.
William Phillips, A Partisan Life: Five Decades of the Literary Life (New York: Stein and Day, 1983), 73.
William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982), 46–47.
Norman Podhoretz, Ex-friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (New York: The Free Press, 1999).
Nathan Abrams, “Stormin’ Norman Strikes Back,” H-Ideas (January, 2001), https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=4856.
Daniel Silliman, ““The Failure of the New York Intellectuals,” http://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/199/the-failure-of-the-new-york-intellectuals/
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Bloom, A. Whatever Happened to the New York Intellectuals?. Soc 55, 512–516 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-018-0302-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-018-0302-6