Charles Angoff (April 22, 1902 – May 3, 1979) was a managing editor of the American Mercury magazine as well as a professor of English of Fairleigh Dickinson University. H. L. Mencken called him "the best managing editor in America."[1] He was also a prolific writer and editor.
Career
Background
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
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
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]
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]
Charles Angoff Award
The Literary Review offers an annual Charles Angoff Award for outstanding contributions to the magazine during his tenure as editor from 1957 to 1976.[3]
Among Lieber's friends was an editor of the American Mercury (not Eugene Lyons, who was still a U .P. correspondent in Moscow) . He gladly furnished a letter telling all whom it might concern that Charles F. Chase was a news gatherer for the Mercury.[4]
During testimony, members of HUAC identified Angoff as the Mercury person by asking:
Of John Sherman - "Did you attend a luncheon with Maxim Lieber, Charles Angoff, and Whittaker Chambers in which you discussed these credentials and the purpose of them?"
Of Maxim Lieber - "Did you attend a luncheon with Charles Angoff and Whittaker Chambers at which you discussed the matter of obtaining credentials for Sherman?"[5]
Personal life
Angoff married Sara Freedman in June 1943. They had a daughter, Nancy Angoff.[1]
In 1967, his daughter published Marxism and the English Peasants of 1381: a Dream Deferred.[6]
He died on May 3, 1979, aged 77, survived by his wife and daughter.[1]
Works
In his writings, Angoff may have become best known for his non-fiction and fiction works concerning his former boss, H. L. Mencken, and associate George Jean Nathan. As Time magazine wrote in 1961, "Having fanged his ex-idol non-fictionally in H. L. Mencken: A Portrait from Memory, Angoff releases some fictional venom in The Bitter Spring. Mencken is portrayed as a loud-mouthed vulgarian and an intellectual fraud with but a single saving grace, his love of music..." by the name of "Harry P. Brandt."[7] Regarding his editing of the writings of Nathan, Time wrote, "Mercury associate, Charles Angoff, has reached back over 34 years, dusted off Nathan's personal Five-Foot Shelf of writings (some 39 books) and pieced together a Nathan sampler. Sipped, The World of George Jean Nathan is a delight; swallowed, it leaves a faintly rusty taste on the palate, like water too long in the taps. With malice toward some, Nathan has his say on every subject under his sun."[8]
American Mercury Reader: A Selection of Distinguished Articles, Stories, and Poems Published in the American Mercury during the Past Twenty Years, edited by Lawrence Spivak and Charles Angoff (1944, 1979)