 | ||
The New York Intellectuals were a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. Mostly Jewish, they advocated left-wing politics but were also firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and Socialism while rejecting Soviet Communism as a workable or acceptable political model.
Trotskyism emerged as the most chosen standpoint among these anti-Stalinist Marxists. Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leslie Fiedler and Nathan Glazer were members of the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League.
Overview
Writers often identified as members of this group include Hannah Arendt, William Barrett, Daniel Bell, Saul Bellow, Elliot Cohen, Midge Decter, Leslie Fiedler, Nathan Glazer, Clement Greenberg, Paul Goodman, Richard Hofstadter, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahv, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag, Harvey Swados, Diana Trilling, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Warshow.
Many of these intellectuals were educated at City College of New York ("Harvard of the Proletariat"), New York University and Columbia University in the 1930s, and associated with the left-wing political journals the Partisan Review, Commentary, and Dissent. Writer Nicholas Lemann has described these intellectuals as "the American Bloomsbury".
Some, including Kristol, Hook, and Podhoretz, later became key figures in the development of Neoconservatism.