An excellent study of American intellectuals in the 40's and 50's. The period between the close of World War II and the American government's full-scale involvement in Vietnam was, we have long been told, a gray one in the annals of political dissent and liberalism. But Richard Pells shows that the times had more to them than a tired acceptance of things as they were. He examines intellectuals of the period--C. Wright Mills, Dwight MacDonald, Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Boorstin, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, and Edmund Wilson among them--who resisted the reigning conservatism through their writings in magazines like Dissent , The New Republic , and Partisan Review . These heroes fought among themselves so much that they could never constitute an organized political body, but they did keep things lively, even if conservative critics were readily able to steamroller them. This is solid social history that turns up several surprises. "The New York intellectuals are fortunate this time out in being in the hands of a chronicler who grinds no axes o their reputations and does them the courtesy of close if sometimes critical readings."―Walter Goodman, The New York Times "[This book] contains perceptive discussions of major thinkers and intellectual movements."―Christopher Lasch, Journal of American History "Without question this is a significant work of scholarship by a serious and able historian. It will certainly long stand as an interpretive work to be reckoned with as our understanding of the early post-war period continues to evolve"―Paul Boyer, Reviews in American History "The New York intellectuals are fortunate this time out in being in the hands of a chronicler who grinds no axes o their reputations and does them the courtesy of close if sometimes critical readings."―Walter Goodman, The New York Times "An excellent study of American intellectuals in the 1940's and 1950's."―David M. Oshinsky, The New York Time Book Review 6 x 9 trim. LC 89-14676 RICHARD H. PELLS is a graduate of Rutgers University (B.A., 1963) and Harvard (Ph.D., 1969). Now professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, he has taught at Harvard, received a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities fellowship, and has been a visiting professor at the University of São Paulo, Brazil, and a Fulbright-Hays Senior Lecturer at the universities of Amsterdam and Copenhagen. He is also the author of Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Wesleyan, 1984). He lives in Austin. Used Book in Good Condition