New York Intellectuals

For a generation, this book has stood as the authoritative account of an often misunderstood chapter in the history of a celebrated tradition among literary radicals in the United States that began in the Great Depression. Wald’s passionate investigation of over half a century of dissident Marxist thought, Jewish internationalism, fervent political activism, and the complex art of the literary imagination is enriched by more than one hundred personal interviews, unparalleled primary research, and critical interpretations of novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of committed writers and thinkers. Wald's commanding biographical portraits of rebel outsiders, some of whom founded Partisan Review, who mostly became insiders, often Cold War liberals and a few neoconservatives, retains its resonance today. Included is commentary on Max Eastman, Elliot Cohen, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Tess Slesinger, James Burnham, Meyer Schapiro, Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, and more. With a new preface by the author that tracks the rebounding influence of these intellectuals in the era of Occupy and Bernie Sanders, this anniversary edition shows that the trajectory and ideological ordeals of the New York intellectual Left still matters today.