15 Facts About Philip Rahv

Philip Rahv was an American literary critic and essayist.

Philip Rahv was one of the first to introduce Kafka to American readers.

Philip Rahv was born to a Jewish family in Kupin, Russian Empire which was part of the Galicia region.

The family migrated and spent two years in Vienna, where Philip Rahv attended the gymnasium.

Philip Rahv made his way to Providence, Rhode Island, with his father and two brothers, Selig and David.

Philip Rahv lived for a time in Palestine where his mother chose to live, and worked as a teacher of Hebrew, in Portland, Oregon, from 1928 to 1931.

Philip Rahv wrote at first under the name Philip Rann.

Philip Rahv was officially expelled as a Trotskyite by the American Communist Party on October 1,1937.

Philip Rahv taught at Brandeis University in his later years and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973.

An exception was T S Eliot, whose intellectual depth and historic sense Rahv continued to admire, Eliot's increasingly reactionary politics and traditional religiosity notwithstanding.

Philip Rahv deplored the dichotomy, looking to the future for the kind of synthesis achieved by such European writers as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann.

Philip Rahv reached the height of his literary influence editing and writing for Partisan Review in the late 1930s.

Philip Rahv's influence continued through the 1940s with his writings on a wide range of European and American authors, most notably Henry James, whose reputation he contributed to reviving.

Philip Rahv played little role in Partisan Review in this era, publishing essays in other publications, most notably The New York Review of Books.

Philip Rahv never finished his final project, a book on Dostoyevsky.