The 'Filthy Little Slum Child' Who Remade the American Right

"As it turned out, those friends accurately anticipated the hostility that would flow its way, and how its publication would send Podhoretz into a kind of internal exile on the Upper West Side. But they misjudged the literary merits of the book. Like the book's subject, ambition, Podhoretz's prose burst from the pages. His slashing judgments of his peers-a style that one of his friends described as "the emperor has no scrotum"-were, in turns, self-serving and bravely honest."

"Podhoretz's memoir chronicles the first chapters of a life that ended this week at the age of 95. What his friends misunderstood, and his enemies could never see, was that Podhoretz was both a political intellectual and a literary invention. He was one of the greatest magazine editors of the 20th century, an ideologue who remade the American right, and a self-invented character with profound flaws-someone whose biography can be read as a novelistic tale of the Golden Age of American Jewry."

Norman Podhoretz published a confessional memoir that provoked intense hostility from peers while revealing unapologetic ambition and blunt literary judgments. The memoir portrayed candid personal habits and defended the pursuit of fame and money. Early reviewers and friends warned of reputational damage and urged retraction, yet the prose displayed striking energy and fearless criticism. Podhoretz functioned both as a political intellectual who helped reshape the American right and as a deliberate literary persona. His career combined magazine editing excellence, ideological influence, and self-invention, culminating in a life whose early chapters read like a novelistic portrait of midcentury American Jewish experience.

Read at The Atlantic