Irving Howe

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Irving Howe (born June 11, 1920 in New York City , † May 5, 1993 ibid) was an American literary scholar and university professor .

Life

Irwing Howe was born in the East Bronx , the son of a Jewish grocer who lost his shop during the Great Depression and went on to work as a peddler and cloth presser . In his autobiography Howe describes his childhood and youth, marked by poverty and privation, in the midst of the community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.

He graduated from City College in New York City with a degree in English literature and served as a soldier in World War II . Back in civilian life in New York City, he earned his living doing cultural journalism for the then influential Partisan Review . From 1953 to 1963 he had lectureships at the universities of Brandeis and Stanford . He received in 1963 a professor of English literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York .

Against the background of his own origins, Howe remained deeply rooted throughout his life in the intellectual class that had formed in New York from the descendants of Jews who immigrated from Eastern Europe. In his book World of Our Fathers , he describes in moving form the immigration of Eastern European Jews and their ambivalent common connection between fear of God and love on the one hand and disrespect and distance on the other. For Howe, however, the United States always remained "the Promised Land". In one of his last works about Ralph Waldo Emerson he expresses his hope for this new country and describes it as "The American Newness".

He made great contributions to the editing and translation of Yiddish literature into English. Among other things, he arranged for the first transmission of Isaac Bashevis Singer's works in the Partisan Review . He edited the works of George Gissing , Edith Wharton , Leon Trotsky and George Orwell . From 1953 he was editor of the magazine Dissent , of which he was one of the founders.

His literary reviews and essays have appeared in numerous intellectual journals, including Commentary , Politics , The Nation , The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books . He was counted among the leading figures of the New York Intellectuals .

In 1987 he was a MacArthur Fellow . He has also been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1973 and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1979 .

Works (selection)

  • A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (1963)
  • World of Our Fathers (1976)
  • Celebrations and Attacks Essays and Literary Reviews (1979)
  • A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (1982)

editor

  • Favorite Yiddish Stories (1974; with Eliezer Greenberg)
  • The Best of Shalom Aleichem (1979; with Ruth R. Wisse)
  • The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (1987)

literature

  • Gerald Sorin: Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See the information in the obituary by Richard Bernstein , online Irving Howe, 72, Critic, Editor and Socialist, Dies . In: The New York Times , May 6, 1993. Retrieved March 8, 2018.
  2. ↑ See the information in the obituary by Norman Birnbaum , online Das Vorbild . In: Die Zeit , May 14, 1993. Retrieved March 8, 2018.
personal data
SURNAME Howe, Irving
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horenstein, Irving
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American literary scholar
DATE OF BIRTH June 11, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH May 5, 1993
Place of death New York City