Overview

Max Lerner was a gifted writer and educator whose passion for life made him anything but an ivory tower recluse. In public a prominent commentator and college professor, in his private life he was a romantic adventurer, pursuing erotic relationships with unflagging zeal. He had two marriages (and six children) and became a close friend and frequent guest of Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion West. One of his liaisons was with Elizabeth Taylor—who fondly referred to him as ""my little professor."" Max Lerner recounts the life and times of this fascinating figure of ""the American century."" Politically, Lerner went through a series of metamorphoses. During the 1930s, he was an anti-fascist ""popular front progressive"" writing for the Nation and the New Republic. From the 1940s through the 1970s, he became the country's leading liberal columnist—first with the lively but short-lived PM, then for the New York Post. In the 1980s, however, he was repelled by the New Left and the counterculture and joined the ranks of the neoconservatives, scandalizing some readers but insisting he owed it to them to tell the truth as he saw it. This riveting biography begins with Lerner's own gripping account of the hardships his family endured in emigrating from Russia and his own boyhood triumphs and frustrations. Sanford Lakoff traces Lerner's American pilgrimage from his education at Yale, where he felt the bitter sting of anti-Semitism, through his years as a radical inspired by Thorstein Veblen, into mellower maturity as a widely read columnist, an inspiring teacher, the author of America as a Civilization, a much-loved father, and—to the end—an unapologetic romantic, who liked to say that he never learned anything worth knowing except from women.

Full Product Details

9780226468310

Table of Contents

Reviews

A respectful biography of the immigrant journalist and sometime intellectual gadfly. Lerner, who came to the US from Russia in the wake of revolutionary-era pogroms, enjoyed early success as a scholar, despite the anti-Semitism that greeted him in the academy (a professor of his at Yale warned him, I hate to tell you this, but you ought to know that, as a Jew, you'll never get a teaching post in literature in any Ivy League college ). After earning his doctorate, Lerner went on to combine a teaching career at several prominent schools with a parallel career as a public intellectual, a journalist and editor for the Nation and other magazines. As a columnist for the short-lived newspaper PM and later the New York Post, Lakoff writes, Lerner would enjoy his greatest influence; an early defender of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal reforms and vocal critic of Supreme Court justices who opposed them, he quickly rose to prominence in liberal circles, and his pieces were widely syndicated and reprinted. Lakoff, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego, explores the evolution of Lerner's political thought from Marxist to anti-Stalinist socialist to Cold War liberal. In the last guise, Lerner supported the American effort to contain the Soviet Union's perceived expansionism and championed Lyndon Johnson's policies in Vietnam. He also began to write of matters like Elizabeth Taylor's marriages instead of the latest legislation or literary novel, and to spend more time at Hugh Hefner's Playboy mansion than at scholarly conferences. His retreat from activism and apparent acceptance of the status quo lost Lerner readers in the 1960s, and he would never regain his former influence, although writers ranging from William Buckley to I.F. Stone considered him to be among the best political journalists of his day - or any other. For readers interested in modern American political history, Lakoff's life of the writer will be of much use. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Countries Available