"He 'Wrote with His Bones'"

"Howe had a heroic conception of the intellectual, and from an early age, he thrust himself into the growing world of little magazines. In his 20s, after his discharge from the Army, he worked as an intern, to use an anachronistic term, for Dwight Macdonald and Hannah Arendt. Both of these early patrons came to somewhat annoy him, but he paid close attention to their methods. Even as he became one of the greatest practicing critics in the country, he was also the sharpest, most observant student of his fellow intellectuals. They were truly his great subject. (His encomium, 'The New York Intellectuals,' deserves inclusion in any anthology of the 20th century's great essays—and is perhaps the most brilliant product of the group he sketched.) Howe wrote about other writers with anthropological detachment, followed by blazing expressions of his disappointment with them. Namely, he flayed them for failing to do the most elemental part of their job, holding society to account."


Franklin Foer in The New Republic reviews A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays by Irving Howe.


As does David Marcus in The New Republic.