Making It

A crucial record of American intellectual life, Norman Podhoretz's controversial memoir about his journey from a tough Brooklyn neighborhood to the ivory tower of academia is a takedown for the ages, and timely for its observations concerning the relationship between politics, money, and education.

Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and attended Columbia on a scholarship, while also receiving degrees from Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Returning to New York, he established himself as a pugnacious critic of literature and politics before becoming editor of Commentary magazine. Podhoretz was a central figure in the literary and political developments and controversies of the fifties and sixties, very much on the left. Then, in the early seventies, he entirely rejected his earlier positions, becoming a fierce neo-conservative, as he remains to this day.

Making It came out in 1967, before that change of heart, though the scandal it would provoke helped to bring it about. Making It is Podhoretz's account of fighting his way from the streets of Brooklyn into and out of the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally into the ranks of what he calls "The Family," the small group of largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions had come to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still pertinent analysis of the tense and not a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power.

The Family responded to Podhoretz's book with savage outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them. Fifty years later, this controversial and legendary book remains both a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life.