Norman Podhoretz
A Biography

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, long-time editor of the influential magazine Commentary.

Thomas L. Jeffers (Author)

9781107617872, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 2 January 2014

408 pages, 24 b/w illus.
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.3 cm, 0.62 kg

"Norman Podhoretz’s long, complex intellectual and personal odyssey has been thoroughly documented, richly annotated and sympathetically captured in Marquette University professor of literature Thomas L. Jeffers’s Norman Podhoretz: A Biography." -Barbara Kay, The Dorchester Review

This is the first biography of the Jewish-American intellectual Norman Podhoretz, long-time 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.

Prologue
1. Brownsville
2. Columbia
3. Cambridge
4. The family and the army
5. The practicing critic
6. Boss
7. 'This was bigger than both of us'
8. One shoe drops
9. Dropping the other shoe
10. Liberalism lost
11. George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a lecture tour
12. Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the question of America's nerve
13. Moynihan, Podhoretz, and 'the party of liberty'
14. Breaking and closing ranks
15. Present dangers
16. 'The great satan of the American romantic left'
17. Regulated hatreds
18. Culture wars
19. A literary Indian summer
20. Verdicts
21. New wars for a new century
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Politics & government [JP], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History of the Americas [HBJK]