Max Eastman: A Life

Once a renowned and dashing figure of the American left, writer, editor, and poet Max Eastman (1883–1969) has largely faded from public consciousness. Biographer Irmscher (Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science) makes a fitfully persuasive case for Eastman’s enduring relevance with this sympathetic reading of him as a “poet-philosopher” and restless individualist influenced early on by Walt Whitman and family friend Mark Twain. Irmscher’s admiring biography dwells on Eastman’s family and upbringing, many tangled love affairs, and rocky fatherhood, sourcing much of its insights from Eastman’s personal papers (including some unpublished poems). However, Irmscher doesn’t go far enough in connecting Eastman’s emotional life with his public one, which he began as a highly effective public speaker and campaigner for women’s suffrage. He then moved to the center of early 20th-century revolutionary ferment as editor of the Masses, a radical New York journal famously embroiled in a WWI-era Espionage Act trial, and of its successor the Liberator (coedited with his beloved sister Crystal). A critic of Stalin from the left, he eventually drifted to the right and into a long association with Reader’s Digest. A fuller picture of these contributions is sacrificed to the emphasis on Eastman’s personal life. Nevertheless, the biography will still be of great interest to readers in American political, intellectual, and literary history. [em](June) [/em]