Review of Books. From the start of his writing career he articulated his key literary values: the need for a synthesis between European and American artistic traditions and between literary modernism and radicalism; the importance of the Marxist dialectic to effectuate such syntheses; the value of cosmopolitanism to promote a broad understanding of the world and the leading ideas of the writer's times; the rejection of parochial ideas based on region, nation, or ethnicity. In one of his most often quoted essays, "Paleface and Redskin," he identified two opposing currents: upper-class palefaces such as Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne and uncultured redfaces such as Walt Whitman and Mark Twain. The result was a dichotomy between consciousness and experience and between symbolism and naturalism. Rahv deplored the dichotomy, looking to the future for the kind of synthesis achieved by such European writers as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. Rahv reached the height of his literary influence editing and writing for Partisan Review in the late 1930s. His 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. With the rightward turn of politics in the 1950s, however, he retreated from his earlier literary and political prominence. He played little role in Partisan Review in this era, publishing essays in other publications, most notably The New York Review of Books. In the 1960s his brief enthusiasm for the New Left was followed by disillusionment. He never finished his final project, a book on Dostoyevsky. Works Image and Idea (1949) – essays The Myth and the Powerhouse (1965) – essays Literature and the Sixth Sense (1969) – essays Essays in Literature and Politics (1978) – essays Modern Occasions, vol 1., 1970–71, issues 1, 2, 3, 4; vol. 2, 1972, issues 1, 2. See also New York Intellectuals Anti-Stalinist left References Bibliography Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: the New York Intellectuals & their World. Oxford University Press, 1986. Barrett, William. The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals. Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982. Cooney, Terry A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle. University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Dvosin, Andrew J. Literature in a Political World: The Career and Writings of Philip Rahv. Ph.D. Dissertation, NYU, 1977. Hindus, Milton. "Philip Rahv, The Critic." Images and Ideas in American Culture, The Function of Criticism. Essays in Honor of