Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World »

Alexander Bloom is Associate Professor of History at Wheaton College

"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.

Library Journal

With an almost breathtaking clarity, Bloom (History, Wheaton College) charts the history of the so-called ``New York intellectuals,'' the mostly Jewish writers who were associated with the Partisan Review from the late 1930s to the 1950s. More than a history of any one intellectual journal, however, this study traces the political passions, ideological concerns, and personal battles of this unique intelligentsia from their mostly poor origins through their rise to prominence in American culture and political life to their ultimate loss of group cohesiveness as a result of the political vicissitudes of the rise of the New Left in the late Sixties. Through well-chosen selections from the writings of these individuals (e.g., Philip Rahv, Saul Bellow, Normel Podhoretz, and Lionel and Diana Trilling), Bloom recaptures some of the initial excitement their writings generated. The book is meticulously documented and is the most important and comprehensive study of this group to date. Herbert E. Shapiro, Empire State Coll . , Genesee Valley Regional Ctr., Rochester, N.Y.