Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land

Perhaps no other figure so personifies the full spectrum of political belief in America as Max Lerner. A Marxist in his youth, a neoconservative in his dotage, Lerner wrote for publications as diverse as the tabloid New York Post, the progressive The Nation, and the titillating Playboy. But no matter how high-, middle-, or low-brow the medium, his ideas were always provocative. Born at the start of the 20th century, Lerner lived through cataclysmic times, and in Max Lerner: Pilgrim in the Promised Land, biographer Sanford Lakoff tries to chronicle both his subject's life and the evolution of his intellect.

As Lakoff points out in his preface, Lerner was something of a maverick, embracing both the sexual revolution of the '60s and '70s and the conservative politics of the '80s, and guided by the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "As life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived." Certainly no one can accuse Lerner of not living, as his close friendship with Hugh Hefner, two marriages, six children, and many rewarding careers as teacher, critic, and philosopher amply attest. But Lakoff is equally intrigued by his subject's life of the mind and his discussions of Lerner's gradual metamorphosis from left- to right-wing gadfly are particularly interesting.