Summary

Norman Podhoretz "is a thinker and writer and polemicist, a geopolitician and student of religious ideas, an autobiographer of genius, a man who reacts sharply to the news as it pours from the press and the airwaves, who thinks deeply, angrily, and sincerely about it, and commits his thoughts into vivid and penetrative argument."So writes the eminent British historian Paul Johnson in his introduction to this indispensable collection of Norman Podhoretz's essays of the past fifty years. Organized by decade, these essays, fascinating in themselves, also add up to a running history of American literature and intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. From Vladimir Nabokov to Saul Bellow, from Ralph Ellison to Norman Mailer, from Hannah Arendt to Henry Kissinger, Podhoretz has dealt with the most important novelists and thinkers of the period. He has also turned his attention to such major European figures as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell, and Isaiah Berlin, and his trenchant appraisals of both Americans and Europeans are as fresh and lively today as when they first appeared. Many of them have been unavailable for years, and will prove revelatory for first-time readers and longtime admirers alike. The New York intellectuals, of whom Podhoretz is the archetype, loved to read and discuss literature, but they never stopped arguing about politics. Intertwined with the literary essays, The Norman Podhoretz Reader offers some of the best and most influential political essays written by anyone in our time. Through such classics as "My Negro Problem -- and Ours," his famous reassessments in Why We Were in Vietnam, and his retrospective look at neoconservatism (of which he was one of the founding fathers), Podhoretz has led and changed opinion throughout his career.In addition to all this, The Norman Podhoretz Reader includes self-contained excerpts from the books Making It, Breaking Ranks, and Ex-Friends that demonstrate why Johnson calls Podhoretz "an auto- biographer of genius." Taken together, these readings provide a rich sample of the work of one of America's great contemporary men of letters -- an extraordinary writer who is equally comfortable discussing the Marquis de Sade and the Middle East, American foreign policy and theological disputes, and who brings the same vigor, intelligence, and literary grace to this amazingly broad range of subjects and issues.

Author Biography

Norman Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary for thirty-five years and is now the magazine's editor-at-large.

Contents Introduction by Paul Johnson
A Bibliographical Note
The 1950sEditor's Note
The Adventures of Saul Bellow
Simone de Beauvoir as Novelist
The Know-Nothing Bohemians
Huck Finn's Literary Journey
The 1960sEditor's Note
My Negro Problem -- and Ours
Hannah Arendt on Eichmann
In Defense of Editing
From Making It: The Brutal Bargain
The 1970s
Editor's Note
After Modernism, What?
From Breaking Ranks: Prologue: A Letter to My Son
From Breaking Ranks: Postscript
The 1980s
Editor's Note
J'Accuse
From Why We Were in Vietnam: Whose Immorality?
Kissinger Reconsidered
If Orwell Were Alive Today
An Open Letter to Milan Kundera
The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The 1990s
Editor's Note
Neoconservatism: A EulogyIsrael -- with Grandchildren
Lolita, My Mother-in-Law, the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt
Philip Roth, Then and Now
What Happened to Ralph Ellison
From Ex-Friends: A Foul-Weather Friend to Norman Mailer
A Dissent on Isaiah Berlin
My New York
Was Bach Jewish?
God and the Scientists
Index
Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Supplemental Materials

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Excerpts

If Orwell Were Alive Today "Dickens," George Orwell once remarked, "is one of those writers who are well worth stealing," which was why so many different groups were eager to claim him as one of their own. Did Orwell foresee that someday he too would become just such a writer? Almost certainly he did not. In 1939, when he wrote those words about Dickens, he was still a relatively obscure figure, and, among those who knew his work at all, a highly controversial one. Only a year earlier, his book about the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, had been rejected on political grounds by his own publishers in both Britain and the United States; and far from being claimed by contending factions as one of their own, he was closer to being excommunicated and excoriated by them all. Nevertheless, by the time of his death in 1950 at the age of forty-six, he had become so famous that his very name entered the language and has remained there in the form of the adjective "Orwellian." At first, this great status rested almost entirely on the tremendous success, both critical and commercial, of his two last novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Thanks to them, all his other books, including several early novels that were scarcely noticed at the time of their publication, as well as literary essays, book reviews, and even fugitive pieces of dated journalism, came back into print and are still easily available. As these earlier works became better known, they gradually enhanced Orwell's posthumous reputation. For example, the much-maligned Homage to Catalonia was pronounced "one of the important documents of our time" by Lionel Trilling when it was finally published in the United States after Orwell's death. And when in 1968 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell came out in four massive volumes, the occasion was seized upon by another American critic, Irving Howe, to proclaim Orwell not only "the best English essayist since Hazlitt, perhaps since Dr. Johnson," but also "the greatest moral force in English letters during the last several decades." Bernard Crick, one of Orwell's most recent British biographers, goes, if possible, even further, placing him with Thomas Hobbes and Jonathan Swift as one of the three greatest political writers in the history of English literature (greater, in other words, than even Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill).This enormous reputation by itself would make Orwell "one of those writers who are well worth stealing." It is, after all, no small thing to have the greatest political writer of the age on one's side: it gives confidence, authority, and weight to one's own political views. Accordingly, a dispute has broken out over what Orwell's position actually was in his own lifetime, and what it might have been if he had survived to go on participating in the political debates that have raged since the day of his death.Normally, to speculate on what a dead man might have said about events he never lived to see is a frivolous enterprise. There is no way of knowing whether and to what extent he would have changed his views in response to a changing world; and this is especially the case with a writer like Orwell, who underwent several major political transformations. On the other hand, the main issues that concerned Orwell throughout his career are still alive today, often in different form but often also in almost exactly the same form they took when he wrote about them. This is why so many of his apparently dated journalistic pieces remain relevant. Even though the particular circumstances with which they deal have long since been forgotten, the questions they raise are questions we are still asking today and still trying to answer.If this is true of much of Orwell's fugitive journalism, it becomes even more strikingly evident when we consider some of his major works: Animal Farm and