Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a poem or paragraph that all of us should commit to heart. This week, days after legendary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz’s passing, Joe Nocera reflects on his most famous book, “Making It,” and how its portrait of naked ambition uncannily mirrors his own.
When I learned on Wednesday that Norman Podhoretz, the longtime and legendary editor in chief of Commentary magazine, had died at the age of 95, I immediately downloaded Making It, the autobiography he published in 1967, when he was all of 37. I wanted to recall why it had had such a powerful impact on me when I read it as a young man. It didn’t take long to remember.
“Judging by the embarrassment that a frank discussion of one’s feelings about one’s own success, or the lack of it, invariably causes in polite company today,” he wrote in the preface, “ambition . . . seems to be replacing erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul.”
