Max Eastman A Life by Christopher Irmscher

Irmscher's biography of Max Eastman (Yale, 2017) is a fascinating story about Eastman's role in the 20th Century (he was born in 1893 and died in 1969) and how Eastman followed the arc of some other relatively public intellectuals of the time, from editing the socialist Liberator in 1918, when he was tried and acquitted under Wilson's Sedition Act, to supporting the Russian Revolution --eventually turning against Stalinism -- and ending up writing for Reader's Digest.  Along the way he had three wives and many mistresses, even sharing one in the early part of the century with Charlie Chaplin. Eastman published thirty books on many subjects, including one novel and Enjoyment of Poetry (1939) and Sense of Humor (1922).  Eastman spent several years in Russia in the twenties and translated works by Trotsky, though he was never a Trotskyite. Eastman knew and learned from everyone, from Mark Twain and John Dewey (with whom he studied at Columbia) to Ernest Hemingway, with whom he had a fight in Max Perkins's office (Hemingway thought Eastman had called him impotent).

Like many intellectuals Eastman was often short of cash, so in 1941 he signed up with DeWitt Wallace and Reader's Digest; they paid for him to travel the world and write articles about the places he visited.  Irmscher does not speculate whether or not this made Eastman more conservative but Eastman did soon sign up with William F  Buckley's National Review when it began in 1955.  Eastman finally resigned from National Review in 1964, Eastman's atheism clashing with Buckley's religious posturing (Eastman's parents had both been ministers).  In the early sixties I was a teenager in a house without books so I read mostly magazines that I bought with my paper-route money and found Eastman's writing stylish and thoughtful, following no party line.

Irmscher's biography rather trails off in the fifties and sixties, mentioning Eastman's many love affairs but making little attempt to understand Eastman's constantly evolving political and literary interests; Irmscher, for example, never mentions Eastman's opposition to the Vietnam War, indicating that Eastman never stopped thinking for himself and never fitted into any precise ideology.