In celebration of a new anthology of Howe’s writing, we present three of his essays not previously published in Dissent: “This Age of Conformity” (1954), “The New York Intellectuals” (1969), and “Strangers” (1977).
The question nags, gruesomely: is the fate of the Cambodian people as dreadful as that of the Jews and gypsies in Europe? It isn’t a question one need finally answer; a modest distinction will hold us. The Jews and gypsies …
1 Being an American, we have been told repeatedly, is a complex fate, and being an American writer still more so: traditions ruptured, loyalties disheveled. Yet consider how much more complex, indeed, how utterly aggravating, it could have been to …
The social roots of the New York writers are not hard to trace. With a few delightful exceptions—a tendril from Yale, a vine from Seattle—they stem from the world of the immigrant Jews, either workers or petty bourgeois.1 They come …
James Baldwin first came to the notice of the American literary public not through his own fiction but as author of an impassioned criticism of the conventional Negro novel. In 1949 he published in Partisan Review an essay called “Everybody’s …
