Howe was born as Irving Horenstein in The Bronx, New York. He was the son of Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia. He served in the US Army during World War I. Upon his return, he began writing literary and cultural criticism for the independent socialist Partisan Review and became a frequent essayist for Commentary, politics, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books. In 1954, Howe helped found the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which he edited until his death in 1993. In the 1950s Howe taught English and Yiddish literature at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He used the Howe and Greenberg Treasury of Yiddish Stories as the text for a course on the Yiddish story, when few were spreading knowledge or appre- ciation ofthe works in American colleges and universities. At the request of his friend, Michael Harrington, he helped cofound the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee in the early 1970s. DSOC merged into the Democratic Socialists of America in 1982, with Howe a vice-chair. He wrote many influential books throughout his career, such as The Decline of the New, World of our Fathers, Politics and the Novel and his autobiography A Margin of Hope. Howe's exhaustive multidisciplinary history of Eastern European Jews in America, World of Our Fathers, is considered a classic of social analysis and general scholarship.