"A herd of independent minds," Harold Rosenberg once labelled his
fellow intellectuals. They were, and are, as this book shows, a
special and fascinating group, including literary critics Lionel
Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Rahv
and William Phillips; social scientists Daniel Bell, Seymour Martin
Lipset, and Nathan Glazer; art critics and historians Clement
Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Meyer Schapiro; novelist Saul
Bellow; and political journalists Irving Kristol and Norman
Podhoretz. Their story winds through nearly all of the crucial
intellectual and political events of the last decades, as well as
through the major academic institutions of the nation and the
editorial boards of such important journals as Partisan Review,
Commentary, Dissent, The Public Interest, and The New York Review
of Books.
So deeply entrenched in our intellectual establishment are these
people that it is easy to forget that most grew up on the edge of
American society--poor, Jewish, the children of immigrants.
Prodigal Sons retraces their common past, from their New York City
ghetto upbringing and education through their radicalization in the
'30s to their preeminence in the postwar literary and academic
world.
As Bloom points out, there is no single typical New York
intellectual; nor did they share all their ideas. This book is
concerned with how the community came to be formed, that it thought
important, how and why it moved and changed, and why it ultimately
came undone.
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