Norman Podhoretz: A Biography

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of the influential magazine Commentary. As both an editor and a writer, he spearheaded the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and – after he “broke ranks” – the neoconservative response. For years he defined what was at stake in the struggle against communism; recently he has nerved America for a new struggle against jihadist Islam; always he has given substance to debates over the function of religion, ethics, and the arts in our society. The turning point of his life occurred, at the age of forty near a farmhouse in upstate New York, in a mystic clarification. It compelled him to “unlearn” much that he had earlier been taught to value, and it also made him enemies. Revealing the private as well as the public man, Thomas L. Jeffers chronicles a heroically coherent life.

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of the influential magazine Commentary. As both an editor and a writer, he spearheaded the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and—after he "broke ranks"—the neoconservative response. For years he defined what was at stake in the struggle against communism; recently he has nerved America for a new struggle against jihadist Islam; always he has given substance to debates over the function of religion, ethics, and the arts in our society. The turning point of his life occurred, at the age of forty near a farmhouse in upstate New York, in a mystic clarification. It compelled him to "unlearn" much that he had earlier been taught to value, and it also made him enemies. Revealing the private as well as the public man, Thomas L. Jeffers chronicles a heroically coherent life.

Library Journal

Jeffers (literature, Marquette Univ.) enjoyed the cooperation of Podhoretz and his circle, gaining interviews as well as access to his subject's personal correspondence and the archives at Commentary magazine. He paints a detailed portrait of Podhoretz from his early days in Brownsville, Brooklyn, NY, through his studies at Columbia University and Cambridge, to his able editorship of Commentary, one of the most politically and intellectually influential journals of its day. Jeffers discusses Podhoretz's central role in America's culture wars in the last half of the 20th century, analyzing this liberal New York Jewish intellectual's shift to neo-conservatism and the shift's effects on friends and enemies alike, including Lionell Trilling, Lillian Hellman, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The book recounts the literary and political battles, which took place in the pages of magazines, in publishers' offices, and—at least until Podhoretz stopped drinking—at an endless round of dinner parties fueled by alcohol and ambition. VERDICT A sympathetic life of a neo-conservative icon, this book will be welcomed most by those who share Podhoretz's views.—William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY

Thomas L. Jeffers, a Yale Ph.D. and a Professor of Literature at Marquette University, earlier taught at Cornell and Harvard, where he was a Mellon Fellow. Author of Samuel Butler Revalued (1981) and Apprenticeships: The Bildungsroman from Goethe to Santayana (2005), he has also published pieces in numerous journals, including the Yale Review, the Hudson Review, Raritan, and Commentary. In 2004 he edited The Norman Podhoretz Reader, which provided the inspiration for this book.