“Approaching threescore and ten,” as he writes in the preface to his Selected Writings 1950-1990, Irving Howe has assembled a capacious volume of his essays to give us what he describes as “a reasonably fair picture of an intellectual career spanning four decades.”1 Worth noting, perhaps, is the absence of any claim that the “picture” offered to us in this book is to be considered complete. Those of us who began reading Mr. Howe in the late 1940s will particularly note the omission of anything from those early years of his intellectual endeavors—a period in which the acrid residue of the old factional fights of the Thirties was very much in evidence, setting the tone and defining the substance of every argument and observation. But if this Selected Writings does not give us a complete picture of Mr. Howe’s work over the years, it nonetheless provides quite a lot—enough, certainly, for us to make a fair assessment of the extraordinary career that the book surveys.
Given the high visibility of that career, it is altogether fitting that we should have such a volume to mark the occasion of Mr. Howe’s seventieth birthday—and from one of our most prestigious publishing houses, too. For this is one of the ways in which our much-maligned bourgeois society has traditionally honored its senior men of letters, and there can be no question that Mr. Howe has for many years now been a member in good standing of whatever it is that passes