Overview
Irving Howe, one of America's leading literary critics and the author of the best-selling World of Our Fathers, looks back on his life and times over the past five decades. This is a candid, perceptive account of his growth to intellectual manhood within the political movements and literary influences that shaped American culture.Howe is singularly representative of that generation of New York Jews who willed new lives and made them. As they broke out of the ghetto, their bonds of Jewishness gave way to the magnetism of socialism, in which they saw the fulfillment of Western traditions and sought a new identity.
Howe became a contributor to Commentary, Partisan Review, Politics, and The Nation, and by the 1950s he was accepted and recognized by that brilliant group of New York intellectuals which included Clement Greenberg, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, Philip Rahv, and Meyer Schapiro. In the sixties, he taught English literature at Brandeis and Stanford, all the while reviewing, restoring his links with his Jewishness by editing translations of Yiddish literature, and writing books.
A Margin of Hope brings us right up to the undefined present, the beginnings of the Orwell decade.