Being Interested: Amateur Reports on Books and Ideas

Alan Wolfe, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston College and Adlai Stevenson-style liberal, had a family connection to Dwight Macdonald growing up, the exact nature of which isn’t clear. He revealed this factoid during a lecture commemorating the 50-year anniversary of Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which Macdonald helped popularise through a monograph-length review in The New Yorker (the transcript of Wolfe’s speech was reprinted in The Chronicle of Higher Education ). This connection of Wolfe to a figure who formed part of that famous group known as the NYPIs – New York public intellectuals – makes the job of describing Wolfe’s output a bit easier. His writing is in that ‘not quite scholarship, not quite journalism’ genre that resembles what was produced in the era of ‘little magazines’ from the 1920s to the 1960s of which Macdonald was a prominent, if flaky, contributor. Although a lifelong academic, most of Wolfe’s output has been in the form ...