Ex-Friends

by Podhoretz, Norman

• ISBN13: 9781893554177
• ISBN10: 1893554171
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2000-07-01
• Publisher: Encounter Books

Summary

This book is filled with brilliant portraits of some of the cultural icons who defined our time. Yet anyone who has followed Norman Podhoretz's career as a writer and editor and above all one of the leading controversialists of our time will expect more than just another fond memoir of literary alliances and quarrels, brilliant talk and bruised egos. Indeed, while the book has some of the elements of a personal diary, it is also a diary of combat describing the intellectual and social turbulence of the 60s and 70s and showing how the literary living room was transformed into a political battleground where the meaning of America was fought night by night. Against this backdrop, Podhoretz tells how he left The Family and undertook a trailblazing journey from radical to conservative, a journey that helped redefine America's intellectual landscape in the last quarter of the 20th century and caused his old friends to become ex-friends.

Table of Contents

Introduction: How Our ``Family'' Broke Up	1	(22)
At War with Allen Ginsberg	22	(35)
Going Too Far for the Trillings	57	(46)
Another Part of the Forest: Lillian Hellman	103	(36)
Hannah Arendt's Jewish Problem---and Mine	139	(39)
A Foul-Weather Friend to Norman Mailer	178	(43)
Afterword: Requiem for a Lost World	221	(14)
Acknowledgments	235	(2)
Index	237