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New York Intellectuals
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 but were also 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. Trotskyism emerged as the most common standpoint among these anti-Stalinist Marxists. Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leslie Fiedler and Nathan Glazer were members of the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League. Overview 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, Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Morris Dickstein, Leslie Fiedler, Nathan Glazer, Clement Greenberg, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, Sidney Hook,Michael HOCHGESCHWENDER "Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the United States, and is more than twice as populous as second-place Los Angeles. New York City lies at the southern tip of New York State, and constitutes the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass. With over 20.1 million people in its metropolitan statistical area and 23.5 million in its combined statistical area as of 2020, New York is one of the world's most populous megacities, and over 58 million people live within of the city. New York City is a global cultural, financial, entertainment, and media center with a significant influence on commerce, health care and life sciences, research, technology, education, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell (May 10, 1919 – January 25, 2011) was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor at Harvard University, best known for his contributions to the study of post-industrialism. He has been described as "one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era". His three best known works are '' The End of Ideology'', ''The Coming of Post-Industrial Society'', and ''The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism''. Biography Early life Daniel Bell was born in 1919 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. His parents, Benjamin and Anna Bolotsky, were Jewish immigrants, originally from Eastern Europe. They worked in the garment industry. His father died when he was eight months old, and he grew up poor, living with relatives along with his mother and his older brother Leo.Waters, Malcolm''Key Sociologists: Daniel Bell'' pp. 13–16 (Routledge 1996) () When he was 13 years old, the family's name was changed from Bolotsky to Bell. Educat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dwight Macdonald
Dwight Macdonald (March 24, 1906 – December 19, 1982) was an American writer, editor, film critic, social critic, literary critic, philosopher, and activist. Macdonald was a member of the New York Intellectuals and editor of their leftist magazine '' Partisan Review'' for six years. He also contributed to other New York publications including ''Time'', ''The New Yorker'', ''The New York Review of Books'', and ''Politics'', a journal which he founded in 1944. Early life and career Macdonald was born on the Upper West Side of New York City to Dwight Macdonald Sr. (–1926) and Alice Hedges Macdonald (–1957),Wreszin, Michael, ed. (2003) ''Interviews with Dwight MacDonald''. University Press of Mississippi. a prosperous Protestant family from Brooklyn. Macdonald was educated at the Barnard School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. At university, he was editor of '' The Yale Record'', the student humor magazine. As a student at Yale, he also was a member of Psi Upsilon and hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mary McCarthy (author)
Mary Therese McCarthy (June 21, 1912 – October 25, 1989) was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel ''The Group'', her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949 and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title ''Can There Be a Gothic Literature?'' The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy held honorary degrees from Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith College, Syracuse University, the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Hull. Literary career and public life Her debut ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Norman Mailer
Nachem Malech Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007), known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, activist, filmmaker and actor. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II—more than any other post-war American writer. His novel '' The Naked and the Dead'' was published in 1948 and brought him early renown. His 1968 nonfiction novel '' Armies of the Night'' won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction as well as the National Book Award. Among his best-known works is ''The Executioner's Song'', the 1979 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mailer is considered an innovator of "creative non-fiction" or "New Journalism", along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe, a genre which uses the style and devices of literary fiction in factual journalism. He was a cultural commentator and critic, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfred Kazin
Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. He wrote often about the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America. Early life Like many other New York Intellectuals, Alfred Kazin was the son of Jewish immigrants, born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and a graduate of the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. Career Kazin was deeply affected by his peers' subsequent disillusion with socialism and liberalism. Adam Kirsch writes in ''The New Republic'' that "having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity". He wrote out of a great passion—or great disgust—for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. In 1996 he was awarded the first Trum ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sidney Hook
Sidney Hook (December 20, 1902 – July 12, 1989) was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth, Hook was later known for his criticisms of totalitarianism, both fascism and Marxism–Leninism. A social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism. After World War II, he argued that members of such groups as the Communist Party USA and Leninists like democratic centralists could ethically be barred from holding the offices of public trust because they called for the violent overthrow of democratic governments. Background Sidney Hook was born on December 20, 1902, in Brooklyn, New York City, to Jennie and Isaac Hook, Austrian Jewish immigrants. He became a supporter of the Socialist Party of America during the Debs era when he was in high school. In 1923, he earned a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus."Geary (2007), p. 429 Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" within the society as "bounded by the horizons of property and entrepreneurship", criticizing the "hegemonic liberal capitalist culture running throughout the course of American history". His most widely read works are ''Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915'' (1944); ''The American Political Tradition'' (1948); '' The Age of Re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Goodman
Paul Goodman (1911–1972) was an American writer and public intellectual best known for his 1960s works of social criticism. Goodman was prolific across numerous literary genres and non-fiction topics, including the arts, civil rights, decentralization, democracy, education, media, politics, psychology, technology, urban planning, and war. As a humanist and self-styled man of letters, his works often addressed a common theme of the individual citizen's duties in the larger society, and the responsibility to exercise autonomy, act creatively, and realize one's own human nature. Born to a Jewish family in New York City, Goodman was raised by his aunts and sister and attended City College of New York. As an aspiring writer, he wrote and published poems and fiction before receiving his doctorate from the University of Chicago. He returned to writing in New York City and took sporadic magazine writing and teaching jobs, several of which he lost for his overt bisexuality and Worl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg () (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994), occasionally writing under the pseudonym K. Hardesh, was an American essayist known mainly as an art critic closely associated with American modern art of the mid-20th century and a formalist aesthetician. He is best remembered for his association with the art movement abstract expressionism and the painter Jackson Pollock. Early life Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the eldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. Greenberg attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, then Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. After college, already as fluent in Yiddish and English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. Durin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Morris Dickstein
Morris Dickstein (February 23, 1940 – March 24, 2021) was an American literary scholar, cultural historian, professor, essayist, book critic, and public intellectual. He was Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. A leading scholar of 20th-century American literature, film, literary criticism, and popular culture, Dickstein's work has appeared in both the popular press and academic journals, including ''The New York Times Book Review'', '' Partisan Review'', '' TriQuarterly'', ''The New Republic'', ''The Nation'', '' Harper’s'', ''New York Magazine'', ''Critical Inquiry'', '' Dissent'', ''The Times Literary Supplement'', ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'', '' Slate'', and '' Bookforum''. Dickstein was a contributing editor to ''Partisan Review'' from 1972-2003 and a member of the board of directors for the National Book Critics Circle. He was a member of the National Society of Film Critics and former president of the Assoc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Midge Decter
Midge Decter (née Rosenthal; July 25, 1927 – May 9, 2022) was an American journalist and author.Heritage Foundation Board of Trustees Originally a liberal, she was one of the pioneers of the movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Early life Decter was born in , on July 25, 1927. She was the youngest of three daughters of Rose (née Calmenson) and Harry Rosenthal, a sporting goods merchant. Her family was Jewish. She attended the |
