Philip Rahv

In 1933 Rahv joined the American Communist Party. Partisan Review broke with the Soviet line in 1937 in the wake of the Moscow Trials and maintained an ongoing feud with Stalinist Popular Front advocates such as Granville Hicks of New Masses. He was officially expelled as a Trotskyite by the American Communist Party on October 1, 1937. Rahv taught at Brandeis University in his later years and died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1973.

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.

He 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 attended the gymnasium. He was born under the name Fevel Greenberg. He made his way to Providence, Rhode Island, with his father and two brothers, Selig and David. He 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. He wrote at first under the name Philip Rann. Then came the modification to "Rahv," which appeared in an essay he published in 1932.

Philip Rahv (March 10, 1908 in Kupin, Russian Empire – December 22, 1973 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American literary critic and essayist. In 1933 he and William Phillips co-founded Partisan Review, one of the most influential literary periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century. Initially affiliated with the Communist Party and adhering to their agenda of proletarian literature, Rahv went on to publish a broad spectrum of modern writers in the pages of his magazine. He was one of the first to introduce Kafka to American readers.