The Worlds of Irving Howe: The Critical Legacy is a wide-ranging anthology of criticism devoted to the literary, cultural, and political work of the writer Irving Howe. The book offers a broad cross-section of critical and biographical writings about Howe. Collected here are assessments of Howe's work written by some of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century, among them Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Robert Coles, Daniel Bell, Malcolm Cowley, and Arthur Schlesinger. The critical estimates of Howe's major books, collected here and framed by a major biographical introduction by John Rodden, constitute a sharply focused lens through which readers can re-evaluate the legacy of one of America's leading intellectuals and thereby understand the main issues of twentieth-century Anglo-American cultural history.