In an effort to make clear sense of the plethora of books being published about the New York intellectuals, Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, turns to Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World as an instructive case in point. Bloom, who teaches history at Wheaton College, is neither a scoundrel nor "your garden-variety left-wing militant." If he were, Kramer would, no doubt, have rolled out his big, neoconservative guns. But Bloom is worse, much worse, and so he falls into a category somewhere beneath contempt:

What he is, in other words, is your quintessential liberal academic. He is not given to billboarding his Sixties ideology; he simply assumes, without argument and as a matter of course, that it is from the perspective of the Sixties that the history of the New York intellectuals must now be written. In this assumption he is entirely representative of his academic generation, and it is as a product of the regnant liberal academy—rather than as an account of its subject—that his book makes its principal claim on our attention.