ABOUT THIS BOOK
Despite being one of the foremost American intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century, Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) was utterly incapable of fitting in—and he liked it that way. Signature cane in one hand and a cigarette in the other, he cut a distinctive figure on the New York City culture scene, with his radiant dark eyes and black bushy brows. A gangly giant at six foot four, he would tower over others as he forcefully expounded on his latest obsession in an oddly high-pitched, nasal voice. And people would listen, captivated by his ideas.
 
With Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life, Debra Bricker Balken offers the first-ever complete biography of this great and eccentric man. Although he is now known mainly for his role as an art critic at the New Yorker from 1962 to 1978, Balken weaves together a complete tapestry of Rosenberg’s life and literary production, cast against the dynamic intellectual and social ferment of his time. She explores his role in some of the most contentious cultural debates of the Cold War period, including those over the commodification of art and the erosion of individuality in favor of celebrity, demonstrated in his famous essay “The Herd of Independent Minds.” An outspoken socialist and advocate for the political agency of art, he formed deep alliances with figures such as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, all of whom Balken portrays with vivid accounts from Rosenberg’s life.

Thoroughly researched and captivatingly written, this book tells in full Rosenberg’s brilliant, fiercely independent life and the five decades in which he played a leading role in US cultural, intellectual, and political history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Debra Bricker Balken is an independent scholar, writer, and curator with a focus on American modernism and contemporary art. She is the author of Mark Tobey, Threading Light, and Arthur Dove, A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings and Things.

REVIEWS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Prologue
1 Never had any dreams: Borough Park
2 In the landscape of sensibility: East Houston Street
3 A capacity for action: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and The New Act
4 We write for the working class: The American Writers’ Congress
5 You would have to be recluse to stay out of it: Art Front
6 American Stuff
7 Myth and History: Partisan Review
8 Partisans and Politics
9 A Totally Different America: Washington, DC
10 The Profession of Poetry: Trance above the Streets
11 Death in the Wilderness: The OWI and the American Ad Council
12 Notes on Identity: VVV and View
13 Possibilities
14 Les Temps modernes
15 An explanation to the French of what was cooking: “The American Action Painters”
16 Guilt to the Vanishing Point: Commentary Magazine
17 A Triangle of Allegiances: Arendt and McCarthy
18 The Tradition of the New
19 Pop Culture and Kitsch Criticism
20 Play Acting: Arshile Gorky
21 Problems in Art Criticism: Artforum
22 Location Magazine and the Long View
23 The New Yorker
24 The Professor of Social Thought
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Illustration Credits
Index
 

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