Remembering Irving Louis Horowitz (1929–2012): Introduction

Who can say for sure how Irving Louis Horowitz would have responded to this tribute, two years after he died on 21 March 2012 after complications from heart surgery. I am guessing he would have asked us all to mourn his death for a specified period of time—maybe a year—and then let go. The imperative, Irving would have said, is to live. I hope this tribute would not have displeased him, since more than a year has passed and most of us are still mourning his loss. Rather, I hope this tribute would have made him happy that so many are living to honour his memory by articulating—through our own personal experiences of the man—his enormous impact on those of us who watched him live life so fully.

Proof of that full life comes from Roger Kaplan, who contributed to this tribute and listed the following descriptors in his memorial tribute in The American Spectator: ‘Irving Louis Horowitz was a publisher, a rebel, a conservative, a teacher, a scholar, a writer, a husband, a herculean force, an incorruptible truth-teller, a scourge of phonies, a scold, a taskmaster, a slave-driver, a man of volcanic temperament, a man of great appetite, a traveler, a perpetual student, a Jew and an American, an intellectual, a friend of dogs, a basketball player, a decent man, a decent, decent man, a friend.’¹

I first met this publisher and decent man in the early 1980s when he visited the New Jersey-based Humanities Press, where I was working with another herculean force of the publishing world, Simon Silverman. I suspected at the time that the visit was a scouting expedition to see if there were any opportunities for Transaction Publishers and Humanities Press to collaborate. Although nothing came to fruition, Irving certainly made a big impression on me, and since then—and up until his death—our paths crossed with his occasional contributions to the Journal of Scholarly Publishing or with my querying his level of interest in manuscripts for Transaction’s series on publishing. Those exchanges led to Irving asking if I was interested in joining Transaction’s board, and though I accepted his invitation, our discussion of board issues was cut short by his passing. This is when the idea of a tribute first entered my head.

What follows is a special feature of JSP honouring the memory of Irving Louis Horowitz through the words of professional colleagues who can speak about the multifaceted personality that made the man so complex. Anyone who has read Irving’s memoir, Daydreams and Nightmares, which is often alluded to in the tributes that follow, will understand why life-as-a-struggle became one of his central metaphors. Struggle is what gives life meaning, Irving would say, and in the following tributes, each writer, colleague, and friend wrestles with how best to make this man come alive to those who may not have had the pleasure of meeting him; heaven knows, it is not an easy task, but in their own unique ways, I feel that all of the contributors have succeeded. One of those contributors, Laura Tartakoff, fittingly echoes in her tribute the words of Jorge Luis Borges, ‘others will be (and we already are) Irving Louis Horowitz’s real immortality on earth’—a phenomenon that I hope would make Irving smile.