Philip Rahv's writing career began during the
Depression. It reflected the prevailing literary currents of
Marxism and the rise of
proletarian literature. In search of a collective ideology, he and others of his generation rejected the formalism and social disengagement of the great writers of the 1920s. An exception was
T. S. Eliot, whose intellectual depth and historic sense Rahv continued to admire, Eliot's increasingly reactionary politics and traditional religiosity notwithstanding. Because Rahv believed the creative contradictions within a writer are the greatest measure of his achievement, he welcomed the opportunity to reconcile Eliot's conservative views with revolutionary ones that his writing also contained. Rahv's literary influence arose from his role as editor, author, and reviewer for
Partisan Review and other magazines including
The New York Review of Books. From the start of his writing career, he articulated his key literary values: the need for a synthesis between European and American artistic traditions and between literary modernism and radicalism; the importance of the Marxist
dialectic to effectuate such syntheses; the value of cosmopolitanism to promote a broad understanding of the world and the leading ideas of the writer's times; the rejection of parochial ideas based on region, nation, or ethnicity. In one of his most often quoted essays, "Paleface and Redskin", he identified two opposing currents: upper-class palefaces such as
Henry James and
Nathaniel Hawthorne and uncultured redfaces such as
Walt Whitman and
Mark Twain. The result was a dichotomy between consciousness and experience and between symbolism and naturalism. Rahv deplored the dichotomy, looking to the future for the kind of synthesis achieved by such European writers as
Marcel Proust and
Thomas Mann. Rahv reached the height of his literary influence editing and writing for
Partisan Review in the late 1930s. His influence continued through the 1940s with his writings on a wide range of European and American authors, most notably Henry James, whose reputation he contributed to reviving. With the rightward turn of politics in the 1950s, however, he retreated from his earlier literary and political prominence. He played little role in
Partisan Review in this era, publishing essays in other publications, most notably
The New York Review of Books. In the 1960s his brief enthusiasm for the
New Left was followed by disillusionment. He never finished his final project, a book on
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. ==Works==