Never Stop Running: Allard Lowenstein and the Struggle to Save American Liberalism.(Brief Article)

Chafe, once again, has written a path-breaking book. Chafe - well known for his work on women's history and the civil-rights movement - offers a definitive biography of Lowenstein, the peripatetic liberal activist, that is both an old-fashioned, life-and-times portrait and an innovative, historical study of human sexuality at an individual and social level.

The methodological strength of this biography lies in Chafe's sustained analysis of the personal politics of gay identity in the 1940s-1970s period as Lowenstein experienced it. Chafe draws on the small but growing literature on gay lives in midtwentieth-century America to bolster his compelling arguments about the …