Vanished Writer, Vanished Book  

▪ Winter 2016

…I cannot write otherwise than I do write. I am unable to, and I will not, even though I should want to violate myself; there is a literary law which makes it impossible to violate a literary talent—even with your …



C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir  

▪ Winter 1963

I first met C. Wright Mills in 1941 or 1942, when he was a young assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland (at that time, at least, a singularly dismal-looking provincial school whose president was one “Curly” Byrd, …



Ben Seligman  

▪ February 1971

Ben Seligman was an old-fashioned socialist intellectual. The world is full of “old-fashioned intellectuals” for whom the concept of socialist fraternity has long since lost whatever value it might once have had. And it reverberates to the cries of “socialist …



Vanished Writer, Vanished Book  

▪ February 1, 1971

Forty years ago Boris Pilnyak was recognized throughout Europe as “one of the giants of the modern novel,” in the words of the dust jacket on his now forgotten The Volga Falls to the Caspian Sea. At this point in …



The People’s Symphony: A Tribute  

▪ January 1, 1967

For the better part of twenty years my wife and I have attended, often with our friends, occasionally with our children, a chamber music series in Manhattan’s Washington Irving High School, off Union Square. The series, incorporated in 1900 by …



A Window on Negro Intellectuals  

▪ April 1, 1964

Soon, One Morning: New Writing by American Negroes edited by Herbert Hill Alfred A. Knopf, 617 pp., $6.95 This collection should not be thought of as inclusive: one will search in vain for such novelists as Mark Kennedy, Julian Mayfield, …



The UAW: Over the Top or Over the Hill?  

▪ September 1, 1963

In the midst of the great organizing drive of the CIO, which was to culminate in the solid establishment of industrial unionism in the United States, John L. Lewis came to Detroit to address a mass meeting. Some ten thousand …



C. Wright Mills: A Personal Memoir  

▪ January 1, 1963

I first met C. Wright Mills in 1941 or 1942, when he was a young assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland (at that time, at least, a singularly dismal-looking provincial school whose president was one “Curly” Byrd, …





The Miners: Men Without Work  

▪ Fall 1959

They stroll the narrow, shabby streets, chat at the corners, lean against the peeling pillars of the town saloon, the St. Michael Hotel & Restaurant, and they look more like movie actors than real human beings, because something is wrong. …





Exurbia Revisited  

▪ Spring 1956

THE EXURBANITES, by A. C. Spectorsky. Lippincott. $3.95. I looked up recently after a sojourn abroad to find that a new word had sneaked into the language while my back was turned, like the 8:55 crawling into the station at …







Fall 2024

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