The Last Socialist

Introducing Michael Harrington on Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr. once quipped that being a socialist in America is akin to being the tallest skyscraper in Kansas... Now Maurice Isserman, one of the major historians of the American Left, has produced a sympathetic yet critical account of how this product of traditional Catholic education moved to adopt a very American form of Marxism... With Harrington's passing, the socialist tradition in America came to an end. There is much to admire in his life -- his personal courage, his commitment to social justice, and his lifelong devotion to creating a democratic-socialist movement in the nation in which it was least possible. In Maurice Isserman, he has a biographer who does justice to his life's work.