Remembering Irving Howe

If you become a teacher you will yearn for a teacher of your own. Long before death stole Irving from us this irony of academia hit me when, through his open classroom door, I caught snatches of Professor Howe’s brilliant lectures on Dickens or Twain. Irving’s occasional public lectures also left me with a craving for more of his tough-minded insights on politics and the arts. Why then, over coffee in the cafeteria of the City University Graduate Center, would he persist in asking...