Irving Howe: a life of passionate dissent, by Gerald Sorin

Saul Bellow dismissed Irving Howe as "an old-fashioned lady". Philip Roth parodied him as Milton Appel, a "sententious bastard". Woody Allen joked about Howe's magazine, Dissent, in Annie Hall. Is that all that's left of Irving Howe, 10 years after his death: a walk-on part in the work of more famous contemporaries?

As Gerald Sorin's well-researched biography makes clear, in his heyday Howe was a major figure on the US intellectual scene. He founded and edited Dissent, wrote for Commentary and Partisan Review, and knew (and argued with) everybody who was anybody in post-war America. His story is an insider's view of the New York intellectual hothouse over 40 years.

Three themes run through Howe's writings: socialism, literature and Jewish culture. Like so many New York intellectuals, Howe was the child of Jewish immigrants, and grew up in the Yiddish-speaking, working-class world that he was to describe so eloquently in his bestseller, World of Our Fathers (1976).

His politics were formed by the Depression and student days at City College. Howe emerged a lifelong socialist, moving from youthful Trotskyist to middle-aged social democrat, but always anti-Stalinist.

His second love was modern literature. He wrote books on Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner and Hardy, was a literature professor at three universities, and published many literary essays. Increasingly, however, it was his Jewishness that mattered to him: he translated and co-edited eight anthologies of Yiddish literature.

Howe lived a full life: four marriages, almost 50 books (written or edited), and opinions on everything. Why, then, does Sorin's faithful biography leave a strange sense of emptiness? Many of the issues that dominated Howe's life seem dated now. Soviet Communism and the Jewish world that formed him have vanished. The great political events, dutifully chronicled here, are past history. Reading this biography is like reading yesterday's views on yesterday's news.

The world of the New York intellectuals also seems astonishingly parochial. There are almost no references to anyone outside America. The British New Left? European Marxism? Nothing. The contrast with EJ Hobsbawm's recent autobiography is revealing. Although Howe was still writing in the early 1990s, there is hardly anything on contemporary writers or thinkers. His world seems frozen in time, a sort of Jewish Miss Havisham.

Sorin seems to have spoken to everybody who knew Howe. He has read widely and worked hard in the archives. The big questions, however, don't interest him. He doesn't ask why the New York intellectuals left so small a legacy, or what happened to the whole tradition of the public intellectual.

He talks in detail about Howe's Jewishness, but doesn't ask why this extraordinary generation of American Jewish writers and intellectuals suddenly emerged in the 1940s. Why was it such a male world? Large questions of history and context go begging.

Irving Howe was a passionate and humane man. He was right on many of the great issues of his day. After all the articles and arguments, what will endure? Sorin doesn't ask this question, perhaps because he knows that the answer might be: only the anthologies of Yiddish literature, and the cruel verdicts of Bellow and Roth.