Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America

by Neil Jumonville

The period immediately following the Second World War was a time, observed Randall Jarrell, when many American writers looked to the art of criticism as the representative act of the intellectual. Rethinking this interval in our culture, Neil Jumonville focuses on the group of writers and thinkers who founded, edited, and wrote for some of the most influential magazines in the country, including Partisan Review , Politics , Commentary , and Dissent . In their rejection of ideological, visionary, and romantic outlooks, reviewers and essayists such as Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, and Daniel Bell adopted a pragmatic criticism that had a profound influence on the American intellectual community. By placing pragmatism at the center of intellectual activity, the New York Critics crossed from large belief systems to more tentative answers in the hope of redefining the proper function of the intellectual in the new postwar world.

Because members of the New York group always valued being intellectuals more than being political leftists, they adopted a cultural elitism that opposed mass culture. Ready to combat any form of absolutist thought, they found themselves pitted against a series of antagonists, from the 1930s to the present, whom they considered insufficiently rational and analytical to be good the Communists and their sympathizers, the Beat writers, and the New Left. Jumonville tells the story of some of the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront all intellectuals. In this sense the book is as much about what it means to be an intellectual as it is about a specific group of thinkers.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published November 26, 1990

Reviews

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is quite simply a revelation because it connects a young intellectual community of the early 20th century with conservative ideology today. You learn how a group of determinedly liberal and often communist post-grads evolved their perspectives over time, crossing from left to right in such a way that it makes clear that the American political spectrum is much more like a circle than a line. This history is something which today's conservatives hate to acknowledge if they are even aware of it. They often only look to William F. Buckley, Jr. as their Moses when clearly there was an entire tribe already working up the tactics by the time Buckley did so in an overt manner.

This should be primal reading for anyone interested in the current American political landscape and should be on every US Poli-Sci syllabus extant.

The fact that it is an easy, entertaining, and often funny read just adds to the importance which this book should have among political history tracts.