Renewing the Left: Politics, Imagination, and the New York Intellectuals

In this lively look at New York's radical culture from the 1930s to the 1960s, literary historian Teres hauls up the sort of arcana of which Woody Allen dialogs are made: in-jokes about Lionel Trilling and Norman Podhoretz, learned asides on Ezra Pound and Dwight MacDonald. Teres focuses on the founding of Partisan Review, a journal that, said editor Trilling, would forge "a new union between our political ideas and our imagination." Some of its leading exponents would drift rightward in politics during the Cold War, but Teres notes that the New York intellectuals were ahead of their time in realizing that it was possible to criticize Marxism without betraying the workers of the world.