New York Intellectuals

The New York Intellectuals were a group of American writers and literary critics based in New York City in the mid-20th century. They advocated left-wing politics, being firmly anti-Stalinist. The group is known for having sought to integrate literary theory with Marxism and socialism while rejecting Soviet socialism as a workable or acceptable political model.

Trotskyism emerged as the most common standpoint among these anti-Stalinist Marxists. Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, Seymour Martin Lipset, Leslie Fiedler, and Nathan Glazer were members of the Trotskyist Young People's Socialist League, under the influence of Max Shachtman.^[1]

Many of these intellectuals were educated at City College of New York ("Harvard of the Proletariat"),^[2] New York University, and Columbia University in the 1930s,^{[citation needed]} and associated in the next two decades with the left-wing political journals Partisan Review, Dissent, and the then-left-wing but later neoconservative-leaning journal Commentary.^{[citation needed]} Writer Nicholas Lemann has described these intellectuals as "the American Bloomsbury".^{[citation needed]}

Some, including Kristol, Sidney Hook, and Norman Podhoretz, later became key figures in the development of neoconservatism.^[3]