The New York Intellectuals were a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics, being firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and socialism while rejecting Soviet socialism as a workable or acceptable political model.
Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leslie Fiedler, and Nathan Glazer were members of the Young People's Socialist League, under the influence of Max Shachtman.Alexander Bloom: Prodigal Sons. The New York Intellectuals and Their World, Oxford University Press: NY / Oxford 1986, pp. 109, 134.
Many of these intellectuals were educated at City College of New York ("Harvard of the Proletariat"), New York University, and Columbia University in the 1930s, and associated in the next two decades with the left-wing political journals Partisan Review, Dissent, and the then-left-wing but later neoconservative-leaning journal Commentary.Lerner, Saul. Running Commentary: The Contentious Magazine That Transformed the Jewish Left into the Neoconservative Right, by Benjamin Balint. Shofar 29, no. 4 (2011): 164–67. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/shofar.29.4.164. Writer Nicholas Lemann has described these intellectuals as "the American Bloomsbury."
Some, including Kristol, Sidney Hook, and Norman Podhoretz, later became key figures in the development of neoconservatism.
Members
Writers often identified as members of this group include:
Lionel Abel Hannah Arendt William Barrett Daniel Bell Saul Bellow (despite his usual association with the city of Chicago) Norman Birnbaum Anatole Broyard Elliot E. Cohen Lewis Coser Rose Coser Midge Decter Morris Dickstein Leslie Fiedler Herbert Gans Nathan Glazer Clement Greenberg Paul Goodman Michael Harrington Gertrude Himmelfarb Richard Hofstadter Sidney HookMichael HOCHGESCHWENDER "The cultural front of the Cold War: the Congress for cultural freedom as an experiment in transnational warfare" Ricerche di storia politica, issue 1/2003, pp. 35-60 Irving Howe Alfred Kazin Irving Kristol Norman Mailer Seymour Martin Lipset Mary McCarthy Dwight Macdonald William Phillips Norman Podhoretz Philip Rahv Harold Rosenberg Isaac Rosenfeld Bayard Rustin Delmore Schwartz Susan Sontag Harvey Swados Diana Trilling Lionel Trilling Robert Warshow
See also Anti-Stalinist left Communism Frankfurt School Trotskyism Neoconservatism Bloomsbury Group New Philosophers Partisan Review Commentary Magazine The New Yorker Encounters Magazine
Notes
References
Bibliography
Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, Oxford University Press, 1986, Cooney, Terry A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1986, Dorman, Joseph. Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in their Own Words. New York: Free Press, 2000. .
Jumonville, Neil. Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, University of California Press, 1991, Laskin, David. Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals University of Chicago Press, 2001,
Further reading
External links Lives of the New York intellectuals by Robert Fulford in The Globe and Mail The Failure of the New York Intellectuals by Daniel Silliman in Comment Arguing the World, a PBS documentary