Philip Terzian
The Weekly Standard
June 25, 2007 - July 2, 2007
BOOKS & ARTS Vol. 12 No. 39

The New York Intellectuals Reader, edited by Neil Jumonville (Routledge, 456 pp., $30). That famous alcove at the City College of New York where, in the 1930s, students met and argued the merits of Marx, chose between Trotsky and Stalin, pondered the future of socialism, and laid the intellectual foundations for the second half of the 20th century, is restored in this remarkable collection. The names are familiar--Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Norman Podhoretz, etc.--and the subjects remain contentious and pertinent. Neil Jumonville, a historian at Florida State, provides the pertinent biographical data, and completes the definitive portrait of these remarkable essayists, to whom we are all indebted.