Table Of ContentThe New York Intellectuals
Praise for The New York Intellectuals
“His book is not only a model of erudition (based on wide archival research and
more than a hundred interviews) but also a literary work. Remarkably well
written, it is as easy to read as a novel. Without hiding his revolutionary Marxist
standpoint, Alan Wald combines commitment and critical spirit, objectivity and
position held. An example to be followed.”
—Michael Löwy, La Quinzaine Litteraire (Paris), 16–31 July 1987
“Wald brilliantly combines the methods of biography, political theory, and
literary criticism.”
—Antioch Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1987): 376
“Wald has written what in many ways is the best book on the New York
intellectuals by combining a historian’s detachment with a political engagement
with the issues and events that shaped these writers. The primary virtue of
Wald’s history comes from his combination of exhaustive, painstaking research
with a constantly critical attitude toward his sources. . . . Wald knows what is at
stake in the controversies and brings them to life. . . . Wald’s history is the only
one that has the fire of the memoirs. . . . [T]ruly a collective biography.”
—Michael Denning, Socialist Review, January–March 1988
“Wald’s study—subtle, insightful—ranks with that small cluster of fine works
on twentieth-century radicals.”
—Milton Cantor, Library Journal
“Rare for a book so steeped in scholarship, it is both highly readable and
extremely informative . . . a fine combination of good writing and impeccable
scholarship.”
—Harmen Mitchell, Ann Arbor News, Sunday, 17 May 1987
“Many scholars may question . . . the coexistence of ‘objectivity’ and partisan
passion, but Wald has not only demonstrated the feasibility of this approach but
that it can be done with grace, authenticity, and scrupulous accuracy. It is
Marxist scholarship at its best. . . . The author glides adroitly between multiple
roles of intellectual and social historian, political theorist, and literary critic; his
own engaging literary style finds expression in the tightly drawn biographical
sketches that he weaves gracefully into the larger fabric.”
sketches that he weaves gracefully into the larger fabric.”
—Stewart Burns, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 24
(July 1988)
“His method is Marxist, but free of jargon and sensitive to the complexities of
issues and literary critical method.”
—Jeffrey H. Richards, Greensboro News and Record, 8 June 1987
“[Sophisticated, scholarly, and well-researched.”
—J. H. Smith, Choice, October 1987
“Wald’s grasp of the ideological twists and turns of his protagonists is first-rate.”
—D. D. Guttenplan, Village Voice, 15–21 July 1987
“[A] brilliant effort to correct the record and to explain it.”
—The Key Reporter (Phi Beta Kappa), Spring 1988
“Here is political and literary history of the first order.”
—The American Citizen’s Reader’s Catalogue, Winter 1987–88
“Mr. Wald has written a valuable book about the ‘political trajectory’ of this
country’s leading intellectuals over the past fifty years. It is well-researched,
insightful, and extremely opinionated. It deserves a wide audience.”
—David M. Oshsinsky, New York Times Book Review, 7 June 1987
“Wald’s book is still the most thoughtful and comprehensive study of the New
York intellectuals.”
—Ellen Schrecker, The Nation, 1/8 August 1987
“[S]killfully organized so that the reader is seldom drowned in detail, and a
balance is almost always maintained between individual case histories and the
general line of development. . . . He gives as non-tendentious an account of the
‘anti-Stalinist Left’ as is humanly possible.”
—Annette T. Rubinstein, Monthly Review, November 1987
“Wald is a patient, painstaking, and erudite guide, taking the reader carefully
through the clotted, overlapping, dense political and ideological transformations
within, among, and around an extraordinary group of very bright and very
committed people.”
—Cooperative Economic Book Review, March–April 1988
“Wald remains dispassionate and fair-minded, even though almost all the
changes he describes move in a direction which he opposes—that is, to the right.
Eschewing the impossible and scarcely desirable goal of value-free history,
Wald achieves his own aim, of a work that is ‘partisan but objective.’”
—James Seaton, The Centennial Review
“In his biographical sketches, Wald humanizes them and enables us to see a bit
of ourselves in them.”
—Mark Schneider, American Book Review, September–October 1987
“Wald shows how the real-life political conflicts facing his intellectuals shaped
their artistic creations.”
—George Lipsitz, Oral History Review, Fall 1988
“Alan Wald’s book stands out for his honesty and acumen. . . . His firmly held
but temperately expressed position . . . has given him special insight. . . . Wald
focuses knowledgeably on a neglected stage in that journey too little considered
by other literary historians and too often downplayed. . . . Wald repeatedly
demonstrates his skill at applying his political viewpoint, not programmatically
but analytically, to reveal how ideology and fiction are related.”
—Walter B. Rideout, American Literature, October 1988
“Wald’s research is exhaustive. . . . No one is likely to tell us more about these
people in the near future. Nor will anyone do so with greater honesty and
fairness. . . . Wald’s book is signally free from that tendency to settle old scores
and rewrite the past.”
—Michael Sprinker, New Statesman, August 1987
The New York Intellectuals
The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from
the 1930s to the 1980s
ALAN M. WALD
THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION
The University of North Carolina Press
Chapel Hill
© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America The University of North Carolina Press
has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.
ISBN 978-1-4696-3594-1 (pbk: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-46963595-8 (ebook)
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition as follows:
Copyright © 1987 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing, May 1987
Second printing, September 1987
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wald, Alan M. 1946–
The New York intellectuals.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Socialists—New York (N.Y.)—History—20th century. 2. Intellectuals—New York (N.Y.)—History—
20 century. I. Title.
HX92.N5W35 1987 320.5’32’097471 86-24922
ISBN 0-8078-1716-3
ISBN 0-8078-4169-2 (pbk.) Some portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in
Jewish Social Studies 38 (1976); Antioch Review 35 (1977); Prospects 3 (1977); Literature at the
Barricades (University of Alabama Press, 1982), pp. 187–203; and Centennial Review 29 (1985).
TO CELIA
Contents
Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition
Acknowledgments
A Note on the Text and the Illustrations
Introduction. Political Amnesia
Part I ORIGINS OF THE ANTI-STALINIST LEFT
Chapter 1. Jewish Internationalists
The Non-Jewish Jews
Portrait: Elliot Cohen
Portrait: Lionel Trilling
Portrait: Herbert Solow
From Cultural Pluralism to Revolutionary Internationalism
Chapter 2. Dissident Communists
The Menorah Group Moves Left
New Allies: Sidney Hook, James Rorty, Charles Rumford Walker
The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP) and
the League of Professionals
The Intellectual Disease
Chapter 3. Radical Modernists
In Defense of Literature
Other Dissident Writers and Critics on the Left: James T. Farrell, F. W.
Dupee, Edmund Wilson
The Appeal of Trotskyism
Part II REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS
Chapter 4. Philosophers and Revolutionists
The Non-Partisan Labor Defense Committee (NPLD) and the American
Workers Party
Party Factionalism and the “French Turn”
