"Theywere young, Jewish,
urban intellectuals ...
They had assembled on the edge of American society.Coming from the immi–
grant ghettos in which their parents had settled upon arrival in America,they
moved toward the center of American intellectual life....They frequently spoke of
themselves as alienated, by which Norman Podhoretz later came to see meant:
'they did not feel they belonged to America or that America belonged to them....'
What they did belong to was each other.They were,in Podhoretz's telling phrase,
'The Family'-each other's intellectual relatives."
From
ProdigalSons
Their ranks included Lionel Trilling,
Allred Kazin,Irving Howe, Leslie
Fiedler,Philip Rahv,William Phillips,
Daniel Bell,Seymour Martin Lipset,
Nathan Glazer,Clement Greenberg,
Meyer Schapiro, Saul Bellow,Irving
Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. Their
story winds through virtually all the
crucial intellectual and political
events
01
recent decades, as well as
through the nation's major univer–
sities and the editorial boards
01
such
journals as
Partisan Review, Com–
mentary, Dissent, The Public Interest,
and
The New York Review ofBooks
Early Praise for
PRODIGAL SONS:
lJ.f.lAillr.!~"'"
"For those interested in American cultural life of the
period since 1935,
ProdigalSons
is essential reading."
-Publishers Weekly
"The most important and comprehensive study of this
group to date."-Library
Journal
"Aconcise and highly readable guidebook to what was
obviously very exotic and frequently very perilous
territory to
traverse."-Kirkus
"An
exceedingly thorough-going study of this group,
discussing their backgrounds but concentrating on
their interaction with one another, which was
constant, passionate, intimate,and often abrasive."
-Los Angeles Times
"This is sociology with a human face."-
Vanity Fair
$24.95 at better bookstores ordirect from:
Oxford University Press,
Dept. HS,200 Madison Ave,N.Y,NY 10016
