Norman Podhoretz: A Biography

by Thomas L. Jeffers

• ISBN13: 9780521198141
• ISBN10: 0521198143
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-06-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of the influential magazine Commentary. As both an editor and a writer, he spearheaded the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and - after he "broke ranks" - the neoconservative response. For years he defined what was at stake in the struggle against communism; recently he has nerved America for a new struggle against jihadist Islam; always he has given substance to debates over the function of religion, ethics, and the arts in our society. The turning point of his life occurred, at the age of forty near a farmhouse in upstate New York, in a mystic clarification. It compelled him to "unlearn" much that he had earlier been taught to value, and it also made him enemies. Revealing the private as well as the public man, Thomas L. Jeffers chronicles a heroically coherent life.

Author Biography

Thomas L. Jeffers, a Yale Ph.D. and a professor of literature at Marquette University, earlier taught at Cornell and Harvard, where he was a Mellon Fellow.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Prologue	p. xi
Brownsville	p. 1
Columbia	p. 13
Cambridge	p. 23
The Family and the Army	p. 37
The Practicing Critic	p. 47
Boss	p. 63
ôThis Was Bigger than Both of Usö	p. 83
One Shoe Drops	p. 103
Dropping the Other Shoe	p. 123
Liberalism Lost	p. 143
George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a Lecture Tour	p. 158
Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the Question of America's Nerve	p. 169
Moynihan, Podhoretz, and ôthe Party of Libertyö	p. 180
Breaking and Closing Ranks	p. 195
Present Dangers	p. 209
ôThe Great Satan of the American Romantic Leftö	p. 229
Regulated Hatreds	p. 246
Culture Wars	p. 261
A Literary Indian Summer	p. 276
Verdicts	p. 285
New Wars for a New Century	p. 298
Epilogue	p. 317
Notes	p. 327
Bibliography	p. 363
Index	p. 377
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.