In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

i T he first two chapters focused exclusively on Orwell’s British reputation. Now we will turn to Orwell’s American reception, attending to the emergence of his reputation in literary New York by the so-called New York Intellectuals. No other group’s reception of Orwell has borne so decisively on the growth and shape of his American and even his international reputation, and for this reason we seek here to contextualize the group’s reception history of Orwell within its rich and complicated intellectual history. We are chiefly concerned here with the posthumous response to Orwell within the circle of writers associated with three New York magazines: Partisan Review (PR), which published Orwell’s “London Letter” (1941–1946) and was widely regarded as the premier literary-intellectual quarterly in midcentury America; politics , a radical magazine of the 1940s edited by former PR editor Dwight Macdonald ; and Dissent, co-founded in the 1950s by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser. This chapter focuses chiefly on Orwell’s reception by the New York writer who was probably his biggest admirer: Irving Howe. A vocal radical humanist and the most influential American socialist intellectual of his generation, Howe (1920–1993) was the most prominent member of the second generation of New York Intellectuals, the chiefly Jewish secular group associated with PR. Howe was also a distinguished literary critic who wrote or edited works on Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Thomas Hardy, Yiddish fiction and poetry, and numerous other authors and literary topics; his most influential critical study was Politics and the Novel (1957). Howe’s most successful works of nonfiction were World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the Eastern European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (1976), which became a bestseller and received the National Book Award, and his intellectual autobiography, A Margin of Hope (1982). chapter three “London Letter” from a Family Cousin The New York Intellectuals’ Adoption of Orwell 56 their orwell, left and right As we shall see, Howe engaged Orwell’s work seriously and repeatedly: he edited two books about Orwell, wrote several essays and reviews of his work, publicly proclaimed Orwell as his “literary model” and “intellectual hero,” and ultimately became the American intellectual most closely identified with Orwell’s democratic socialist heritage. ii George Orwell was a major influence and near-constant presence in Irving Howe’s intellectual life for almost a half century. But Howe’s relationship to Orwell deepened over time and was strongly conditioned by Howe’s ideological evolution and by contemporary political and social events. His history of reception of Orwell can be roughly divided into four phases. Howe first met Orwell in 1941 through his quarterly “London Letter” in PR’s pages. As the United States entered the Second World War in December 1941, the twenty-one-year-old Howe was a fierce anti-war Trotskyist and the editor of the Trotskyist paper Labor Action. He was also a contributor to New International, the theoretical organ of Max Shachtman’s Trotskyist sect known as the Workers Party (WP)1 in whose pages Howe castigated Orwell for his “uniformly pro-imperialist letters” from England. Howe was particularly incensed by Orwell’s “preposterous statement—fit for the garbage pails” that “to be antiwar in England today, is to be pro-Hitler.” Orwell’s wartime support for the Allies and his statement that pacifism was “objectively pro-fascist” outraged the young Howe.2 In the course of his wartime service in Alaska (1942–1946), however, Howe began drifting away from Trotskyism. Demobilized and back in New York in January 1946, Howe lived on the G.I. Bill and resumed both editing Labor Action and writing for New International gratis. He also continued to promote the pre-war Trotskyist line, vowing both to “destroy . . . the illusion that Stalinism or Social Democracy can bring Socialism” and to “build . . . a revolutionary party which can.”3 But the old fire of sectarian conviction was dying. In July 1946, he contacted Dwight Macdonald, an older ex-Trotskyist and ex-Shachtmanite.4 Howe asked if he might work for Macdonald’s independent (and largely one-man) magazine, politics, which Macdonald had founded less than a year after resigning his editorial position at PR in July 1943. Soon Howe was hired as an editorial assistant, where he patched up subliterary submissions and contributed (under the pseudonym Theodore Dryden) a regular feature.5 The affiliation with politics and Macdonald , a superb literary stylist who had by mid-1946...

Share