Remembering Irving Howe

In May, our friend Irving Howe died, one of the great figures among the so-called “New York Intellectuals.” He belonged to a generation that first made itself known in the pages of the Partisan Review, one of the great magazines of this century in Europe or America. For a brief period, Partisan Review symbolized the alliance between political and aesthetic radicalism, between revolutionary thought and the artistic avant-garde. The alliance didn’t last long, and Partisan Review became one of the battlefields on which the intellectual war of the second half of the twentieth century was waged: a political and philosophical dispute that was, as well, a fight in defense of the freedom of literary express...