Charles Angoff
April 22, 1902
May 3, 1979 (aged 77)
Sara Freedman
Nancy Angoff
Honorary Doctor of Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson University), Charles Angoff Award (The Literary Review)
20th Century
English literature
Career[edit]
Background[edit]
Angoff was born on April 22, 1902, in Minsk, Russia Empire. His father was a tailor named John Jacob Angoff; his mother was named Anna Pollack. In 1908, the Angoffs left Russia and settled near Boston, Massachusetts. By age 12, he began writing poetry. He became a naturalized citizen in 1923.[1]
He studied at Harvard University from 1919 to 1923 on a scholarship and majored in philosophy.[1]
Journalism[edit]
In 1923, Angoff began his career in journalism at a local weekly. He answered an advertisement by H. L. Mencken, who hired him as an assistant in 1925. He worked on the editorial staff of Mencken's American Mercury magazine until 1931, when he became managing editor. He wrote articles for the magazine, either signing them with pseudonyms or publishing them anonymously. Mencken and publisher Alfred Knopf felt Angoff was too leftist and sold the magazine privately in January 1935. Angoff joined the editorial board of The Nation magazine and then became editor of American Spectator until it folded in 1937. From 1943 to 1951, he served as managing editor of the American Mercury.[1]
Writing[edit]
During his final years at the American Mercury, Angoff began publishing more books. When the magazine closed in 1951, he began publishing a series about the Polonskys, a family of assimilating, immigrant Jews. It started with Journey to the Dawn (1951). The trilogy grew to eleven volumes and unfinished twelfth. He wrote a rather controversial biography, H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory (1956) about the subject's anti-Semitism. He wrote several books of poetry.[1]
Academics[edit]
In the mid-1950s, Angoff became an English professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He co-founded the quarterly The Literary Review and helped found the Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, launched in 1967.[1]
He retired in 1976 to the Upper West Side of New York City.[1]
Awards received[edit]
Angoff was appointed to the Board of Trustees of New York City Community College. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Fairleigh Dickinson University (June 1966).
In 1954, he received the National Jewish Book Award for In the Morning Light[2] and again in 1969 for Memory of Autumn.[2] Angoff received various other awards (1954-1977).[1]
According to Whittaker Chambers in his 1952 memoir, Angoff worked closely with him, Maxim Lieber, and John Loomis Sherman after they formed the American Feature Writers Syndicate, a front for communist underground agents as overseas cover. Chambers wrote:
During testimony, members of HUAC identified Angoff as the Mercury person by asking: