Books by Irving Howe

What is the Emersonian spirit? What inspired it, what propelled it? And what does it mean to us today? Howe lays before us the intellectual and personal tragedy of the first great American man of letters, yet also shows that Emerson's belief in the untapped power of free men pervades not only the lives and works of his contemporaries but is also a permanent part of the American psyche.

In this fourth edition of his celebrated critical study, Mr. Howe analyzes all of Faulkner's works, emphasizing the themes that run throughout the novels and stories. "Mr. Howe is a shrewd critic....He has a good many observations that should help readers in going through the novels."-Alfred Kazin.

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society. A Voice Still Heard is essential to the understanding of the passionate and skeptical spirit of this lucid writer. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It shows how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. Howe's voice is ever sharp, relentless, often scathingly funny, revealing Howe as that rarest of critics-a real reader and writer, one whose clarity of style is a result of his disciplined and candid mind.