It remains nearly impossible to disentangle Howe's literary and political interests. He has frequently repeated his belief that no good criticism can be written by persons whose interests are exclusively literary. His active involvement in politics distinguishes Howe's literary work from that of academic critics and theorists; and that involvement, together with his journalistic sensitivity to shifts in the cultural mood, helps to account for the characteristic strengths and weaknesses of Howe's criticism.
Irving Howe was born in 1920 and raised in the East Bronx. The son of David and Nettie Goldman Howe, immigrant garment workers hit hard by the Depression, Howe became a socialist at fourteen. He earned a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1940, and subsequently spent one and a half years doing graduate study at Brooklyn College. He entered the U.S. Army in 1942, and, after serving in Alaska for the remainder of World War II, he returned to New York, where he quickly broke into literary journalism, with pieces in Partisan Review, Commentary, and the Nation. Howe has been married to Arien Hausknecht, by whom he had two children, Nina and Nicholas, and to Ilana Wiener, with whom he edited Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories (1982).
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