Irving Howe - Böcker

An indispensable collection of one of America’s most outspoken and original critics of the second half of the twentieth centuryMan of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America’s most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe’s work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe’s enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society.  A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe’s voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics—a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.

A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

In this fourth edition of his celebrated study of Faulkner, Irving Howe analyzes all of the great author's works, emphasizing the themes that run throughout the novels and stories. "The scheme of my book is simple," Mr. Howe writes. "First, I have tried to say what Faulkner's work is `about,' to report on the social and moral themes in his books; and then I have tried to analyze and evaluate the more important novels." Anyone who has enjoyed the special flavor of Faulkner's writing will appreciate Mr. Howe's careful analysis, and the student of twentieth-century American literature will gain new perspective and insight. Mr.Howe successfully portrays the intimate connection between Faulkner's fiction and the emotional and psychic history of the South without slighting the universality that makes him one of America's greatest writers. "Mr. Howe is a shrewd critic, and he writes of Faulkner's achievements as a practicing novelist with a wary respect. He has a good many observations to make that should help readers in going through the novels.”—Alfred Kazin, New York Times.

This book, first published in 1979, is a representative sample of some of the best articles that have appeared in DISSENT, the American democratic socialist quarterly. They provide a two-sided view of political and social action with the democratic society of the USA.

This book, first published in 1979, is a representative sample of some of the best articles that have appeared in DISSENT, the American democratic socialist quarterly. They provide a two-sided view of political and social action with the democratic society of the USA.

Originally published in 1976, this monumental volume is a study of one of the major migrations of modern times – the result of which has been significantly to alter the history of the United States and of the whole Middle East. In researching this volume, the author drew on many different sources, including the rich materials of the Yiddish press and the vast number of memoirs written in both English and Yiddish. The book traces the historical, cultural and social experience of the immigrant Jews to New York in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who came mainly from Eastern Europe. It covers many aspects of Jewish life in New York – the early years on the East side, Jewish children in American schools, the growth of Yiddish-speaking socialist movements and trade unions, the passion for learning which animated this culture and Yiddish culture in its many manifestations.

Originally published in 1951 and reissued in 1966 this book combines stimulating biography with sound literary criticism in its account of a writer who observed America’s great nineteenth century change from an agrarian to an industrial society. Irving Howe places Anderson in the cultural context of his times and gives a fresh and balanced judgment both of his virtues and limitations. As an artist, the author of Winesburg, Ohio and Dark Laughter was over-valued and then ignored; Howe concludes that the best of Anderson’s work is a durable part of the American literary structure and an enrichment of the American imagination.