New Releases by Irving Howe

This book, first published in 1979, is a representative sample of some of the best articles that have appeared in DISSENT, the American democratic socialist quarterly. They provide a two-sided view of political and social action with the democratic society of the USA.

The National Book Award–winning, New York Times–bestselling history of Yiddish-speaking immigrants on the Lower East Side and beyond. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, two million Jewish immigrants poured into America, leaving places like Warsaw or the Russian shtetls to pass through Ellis Island and start over in the New World. This is a “brilliant” account of their stories (The New York Times). Though some moved on to Philadelphia, Chicago, and other points west, many of these new citizens settled in New York City, especially in Manhattan’s teeming tenements. Like others before and after, they struggled to hold on to the culture and community they brought from their homelands, all the while striving to escape oppression and find opportunity. They faced poverty and crime, but also experienced the excitement of freedom and previously unimaginable possibilities. Over the course of decades, from the 1880s to the 1920s, they were assimilated into the great melting pot as the Yiddish language slowly gave way to English; work was found in sweatshops; children were sent to both religious and secular schools; and, for the lucky ones, the American dream was attained—if not in the first generation, then by the second or third. Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, World of Our Fathers explores the many aspects of this time and place in history, from the political to the cultural. In this compelling American story, Irving Howe addresses everything from the story of socialism, the hardships of the ghetto, and the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed scores of garment workers to the “Borscht Belt” resorts of the Catskills in colorful and dramatic detail. Both meticulously researched and lively, it is “a stirring evocation of the adventure and trauma of migration” (Newsweek).

An indispensable collection of one of America''s most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth century Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America''s most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe''s work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe''s enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe''s voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics--a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.

A compilation of Irving Howe''s interviews during the last fifteen years of his life, this book represents what could be viewed as the sequel to Howe''s intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope, which took the story of his life only up to the late 1970s. Many of these interviews were never published and have existed only as personal tapes in the hands of such scholars and activists as Todd Gitlin and Maurice Isserman. Others were originally published in such venues as The New York Times, The Jerusalem Post, and the PBS documentary Arguing the World. Howe never organized his thoughts about the last fifteen years of his life, during which he gained renown for World of Our Fathers, received a MacArthur Fellowship, and became widely regarded as the leading left-liberal intellectual in the U.S. and, arguably, the leading literary critic in America following the deaths of Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. During this time, Howe also struggled to redefine the American Left in an environment that discounted and marginalized it. Indeed, these interviews may have particular significance today, a period of new opportunities for the liberal Left, yet one in which it struggles to construct some coherent identity and compelling program. The editors worked with the full cooperation of Howe''s family. His daughter, Nina, contributed an afterword and provided a number of illustrations and photos that have never before appeared in print. --Book Jacket.

This collection of accessible, idiosyncratic essays explores such enduring literary concepts as character, style, tone, and genre. All have their origin in Howe''s passion, moral striving, and abiding faith in the common reader. Edited and with an Introduction by Nicholas Howe.

"Combative, compassionate, objective, ironic, restless, Howe reflects on people, ideas, and events..." A selection from Irving Howe''s work covering 40 years of writing.

In this fourth edition of his celebrated study of Faulkner, Irving Howe analyzes all of the great author''s works, emphasizing the themes that run throughout the novels and stories. "The scheme of my book is simple," Mr. Howe writes. "First, I have tried to say what Faulkner''s work is about, '' to report on the social and moral themes in his books; and then I have tried to analyze and evaluate the more important novels." Anyone who has enjoyed the special flavor of Faulkner''s writing will appreciate Mr. Howe''s careful analysis, and the student of twentieth-century American literature will gain new perspective and insight. Mr.Howe successfully portrays the intimate connection between Faulkner''s fiction and the emotional and psychic history of the South without slighting the universality that makes him one of America''s greatest writers. "Mr. Howe is a shrewd critic, and he writes of Faulkner''s achievements as a practicing novelist with a wary respect. He has a good many observations to make that should help readers in going through the novels."--Alfred Kazin, New York Times.

"To confront American culture is to feel oneself encircled by a thin but strong presence. I call it Emersonian, an imprecise term but one that directs us to a dominant spirit in the national experience." Thus Irving Howe, America''s distinguished social critic and a longtime reader of the Sage of Concord, begins this illuminating discussion of Emerson and his disciples and doubters. What is the Emersonian spirit? What inspired it, what propelled it? And what does it mean to us today? History gave Emerson his opportunity and then took it away. Coming to manhood during the 1830s and 1840s, the time of "the newness" when Americans beheld the world with unbounded expectations, Emerson became the spokesman for the self-reliant new man he believed had arisen, ready to thrust aside mossy traditions and launch a new revolution of freewheeling thought. But the rapid pace of the American experience overtook the Emersonian vision; in the 1850s, the rising problems of slavery, a boom-and-bust economy, the vulgarity of mass culture overwhelmed the idealist. His satellite spirits wavered and shrouded the Emersonian optimism: Hawthorne, with his stories of moral breakdown; Thoreau, rooted in nature yet inclined to the cranky and fanatical; Melville, his fathomless blackness waiting beneath archetypal fables of innocence and evil also Walt Whitman, Orestes Brownson, Twain--all were influenced by, yet reacted against, the Emersonian "newness." Howe identifies three kinds of response: the literature of work (Melville and Mark Twain),the literature of Edenic fraternity (James Fenimore Cooper, Whitman, Twain again), and the literature of loss (all the post-Civil War writers). He lays before us the intellectual and personal tragedy of the first great American man of letters, yet also shows that Emerson''s belief in the untapped power of free men pervades not only the lives and works of his contemporaries but is also a permanent part of the American psyche.

We lived There Too is a vivid portrayal of the Jewish immigrants who went west to forge new and vibrant communities in every corner of the American Wilderness. Constructed out of a rich treasury of many hitherto unpublished dairies, memories and letters, together with contemporary newspaper articles, photographs and drawings, this real life saga is filled with dramatic reminiscences that display the humor and humanity of the Jewish tradition. We Lived There Too offers an extraordinary view of men and women in action and constitutes a new chapter in the story of the American frontier.

In six thoughtful, engagingly written essays, Howe surveys a movement he has known firsthand since the 1930s and reflects on its future. "Howe is a marvelously thorough and suggestive critic" (San Francisco Chronicle). Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

A leading literary critic-and the author of World of Our Fathers-looks back on his life from the early 1930s through the 1970s. A perceptive account of Howe''s intellectual growth. Index.

A vibrant collection of photographs, drawings, illustrations and texts depicting the experience of immigrant Jews in America from 1880 to 1930. Includes photography by such masters as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine.