R.I.P. – Conservative Icon Norman Podhoretz Passes Away at Age 95
“There will be so much to be said about him in the days and weeks and months to come.”
Whether you agreed with his views or not, it is impossible to deny the influence Norman Podhoretz has had over the years.
His son John Podhoretz writes at Commentary:
Norman Podhoretz, 1930-2025
My father died tonight, December 16, a month shy of his 96th birthday. Norman Podhoretz passed peacefully and without pain, with a new translation of The Odyssey on his desk that had been sent to him by his friend Roger Hertog. It sat next to a copy of Alexander Pope’s legendary translation, which he had asked my sister Naomi to order for him so he could compare the two.
At the very end of his life, Norman Podhoretz was his truest self, a man of letters.
His greatest teachers, the men who had the most profound effect on him—Lionel Trilling at Columbia and F.R. Leavis at Cambridge—were critics who believed the life of the mind as expressed in literature was a high and noble calling. And I don’t think it’s bragging to say that he was a great literary critic, the last and maybe finest flowering of the group often called the “Partisan Review crowd”—though he did not write much for PR and published his most remarkable work in Commentary‘s pages, beginning with a review of Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural, pushed at the ripe old age of 23. Our website records he published 145 articles in these pages from 1953 to his final appearance, in a colloquy with me about the magazine, in November 2020.
There will be so much to be said about him in the days and weeks and months to come. I’ll say more, as will many, many others. But right now, what I think you might be most surprised to know about my father is not that he was an astonishingly courageous intellectual force… though he was. Nor that his determination to remain true to his ideas, his country, and his people were actually profoundly costly to him in terms of the hostility that he generated and the friends he lost…though all of that is true. Nor that he changed America and the world with his own work (those 145 articles, two decades of newspaper columns in the New York Post and the Washington Post, and 12 books) and his 35 years at the helm this magazine, unequivocally and inarguably one of the most important editorships in American history…though he did.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
rest in peace and condolences to the family
the man was honest enough to take the abuse of being pro america vs being pro cocktail parties
I never heard of him like many other conservative icons. The left runs the history. When they choose who will be remembered they choose themselves.
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