William Phillips, co-founding editor of the cultural journal Partisan Review, which showcased many of the mid-20th Century’s finest writers and critics, including Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Irving Howe and Lionel Trilling, died of pneumonia at a New York hospital Friday. He was 94.
Founded in 1934 with the critic Philip Rahv, Partisan Review began as an organ of the Communist Party but soon broke ranks to pursue a more independent path.
A lonely but feisty voice of anti-Stalinism in the 1930s and ’40s, it went on to publish literature and political and cultural criticism from an anti-communist liberal perspective. Though never large in circulation (5,000 to 7,000 copies in its glory years), it heavily influenced intellectual discourse in America and abroad for several decades through the 1960s.
Known as an astute editor for whom argument was almost a way of life, Mr. Phillips was one of the leading members of an early group of New York intellectuals whose Jewishness placed them outside the mainstream–a group that included Trilling, Philip Rahv, Marxist philosopher Sidney Hook and writer Dwight Macdonald.
Partisan Review became “the original cultural organ” of the group, said Neil Jumonville, an intellectual historian at Florida State University, and inspired other influential journals such as Dissent and Commentary.
Its pages are a treasury of American leftist thought on such topics as whether to support Britain and the West in the battle against the Axis powers in the early 1940s or stake out a third camp.
In the postwar ’50s it opened debate over whether it was possible to be an intellectual in a conformist society.
Mr. Phillips “was a brilliant editor,” said Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell, “in the sense of trying to identify major problems in intellectual and cultural life and getting people to [tackle] them.”
Mr. Phillips was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. His Russian-Jewish immigrant parents separated when he was a year old, causing his mother to take him to live with her family in Kiev, capital of Ukraine, for a few years.
They returned to New York when he was 4 and reunited with his father, Edward, who had traded his family name of Litvinsky for the more American-sounding Phillips.
In 1934 Mr. Phillips joined the John Reed Club, a left-wing group of writers and painters associated with the Communist Party, and soon assumed its top post of secretary. He quickly became disillusioned with the group’s “literary crudity” and political rigidity and began to dream of starting a magazine that would reflect his views.
He met Rahv, who shared his vision. They launched Partisan Review with $800 in their pockets, enough to run the magazine for a year in the ruinous Depression economy.
“We were outsiders beginning something new and had no idea how long it would last or how important it would be,” Mr. Phillips said in a New York Times interview in 1997.
To keep it going, he and Rahv gave dance parties, charging for admission and drinks. They earned a few nights in jail for selling liquor without a license but were acquitted at trial.
The magazine lasted as an organ of the John Reed Club for about two years, during which Mr. Phillips and Rahv grew increasingly disgusted with communist pressure to promote its favorite writers. In 1937 the editors severed its ties with the party and reorganized with a staff that included Macdonald and Mary McCarthy.
The first issue of the revamped Partisan Review contained Delmore Schwartz’s famous story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” poems by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, essays by Edmund Wilson and Lionel Abel, and reviews by Hook and Trilling.
