Irving Howe is the last of the generation of gifted writers and critics who have come to be known, after an important essay by Howe himself, as the "New York Intellectuals." Howe has been both continuator and elegist of that circle, which emerged on...

George Orwell, Arthur Miller and Bertrand Russell have been among its contributors. Influential texts have included Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's then-secret denunciation of Stalin and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."The New Leader, founded in 1924, is a chronically underfunded...

George Orwell, Arthur Miller and Bertrand Russell have been among its contributors. Influential texts have included Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's then-secret denunciation of Stalin and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."The New Leader, founded in 1924, is a chronically underfunded...

ALFRED KAZIN: A BIOGRAPHY By Richard M. Cook Yale University Press, 452 pages, $35 With the death of Alfred Kazin in 1998 at the age of 83, the kind of high-end literary journalism that he’d devoted his life to in over a thousand book reviews,...

Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin. Schocken Books, 348 pages, $25.When I entered college, in the mid-1960's, my freshman class was asked to read two books over the summer: Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King...

Pinsker is an American educator and critic who has written extensively on Jewish-American literature. In the essay below, he presents an overview of the recurring themes in Howe's writings.

Woodward is an American educator and historian who is best known for Origins of the New South: 1877–1913 (1951). In the following review, he discusses Howe's explanation of the failure of socialism in the United States.

Marx is an American educator and critic. In the following review of The American Newness originally published in 1987 in The New York Times, he critiques Howe's thoughts on Ralph Waldo Emerson's individualist philosophy.