Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings [Hardcover]

Alfred Kazin (Author), Ted Solotaroff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2003

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that in his books, essays, and reviews, Kazin succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters, the one who kept closest track of its proceedings, its history, its symbiotic relationship with American society, and its relations with other Western literatures. He did so out of a particularly passionate concern for the significance and well-being of our literary heritage. The America that was mostly a political and cultural position-taking for his fellow New York intellectuals was for Kazin a lifelong possession and a complex fate. His working title for his final book, God and the American Writer, which dealt mostly with nineteenth-century authors, was "Absent Friends."

At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he typically put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." To indicate the development of this charged point of view, Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. These excerpts also provide the pleasure of his sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod literary milieus and of such figures as Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt.

The selections in Alfred Kazin's America follow the course of his career. They are introduced by the editor's substantial essay, which connects the youth to the man and both to the critic, and draws upon Solotaroff's own relations with him. This close joining of the personal to the critical seeks to pass on and reactivate a great American critic's presence and legacy.

As our sense of the American past continues to dry up and threatens to blow away in the heavy winds of change, those writers who can make our heritage come alive again and challenge us become all the more essential. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that takes us back to Emerson and forward through our literature to the better part of our own Americanism.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Intended as "a resource, rather than as a monument" this posthumous anthology traces a biographical arc through the work of one of America's finest literary critics, interspersing selections from almost all of his major critical works (On Native Grounds; God and the American Writer; etc.) with the remarkable memoirs published in his middle later years (A Walker in the City; Writing Was Everything; etc.). Few critics lend themselves to such integration, but as Solotaroff's extensive, nuanced introduction explains, Kazin (1915-1998) "wrote less as a literary critic than as a writer possessed by literature as moral testimony and lived history." The collection starts with his childhood in a provincial Brooklyn ghetto, where his work-dogged mother would leave her sewing machine only long enough to gaze briefly and lovingly out of the window at the world, and impoverished friends found transcendence in poetry and politics. Here, too, the teenaged Alfred, having already seized upon Blake and Hemingway, read the Gospel and found in the co-opted figure of "our Yeshua" a fulfillment of Jewish longing and "another writer I could instinctively trust." Then come Kazin's beginnings in the brave new and largely gentile literary world of the '30s; the months spent at the New York Public Library researching the brilliant study of American realism that made his career; the rise and decline of the literary left and the moral disillusionments following the war. The book ends with his canny but troubled assessment of letters in the early 1980s, the end of the American century. Kazin's great faculty as both a critic and a memoirist was his passionate belief in the voice on the page as a means of communicating historical experience. Here is a writer, and a reader, we can trust.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The New Yorker

The literary critic Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend. As a young man during the Depression, in the "delicious isolation" of the New York Public Library, he immersed himself in Howells, Faulkner, and others, eventually producing "On Native Grounds," a landmark study of American realism and modernism in which he displayed the infallible nose for a writer's best work that distinguished his long career. Later, he turned his critical eye inward, producing three memoirs about his Jewish boyhood in Brownsville and his friendships with famous contemporaries. Kazin died in 1998, and Ted Solotaroff's selection of his work is a fitting tribute: a book that will be a starting point for further reading, both of Kazin and of the native writers to whom he devoted himself.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0066213436
• ISBN-13: 978-0066213439
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,118,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Criticism which makes us see Literature and The world in a richer and truer way, April 21, 2009

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings (Paperback)

This anthology contains excerpts from Kazin's memoir writing, from his critical work on American Literature, from his essays on literary personalities. I was most surprised by personal essays on Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt. I have read much about each of these figures but Kazin's descriptions of them bring new insight. His description of a walk across Brooklyn Bridge with a young ambitious Saul Bellow provides an insight into the remarkable powers of observation of everyday realities- a characteristic which would be one of the great strengths of Bellow's work. Kazin in his praise for Wilson's Civil War volume 'Patriotic Gore' helps us better understand the great strength of this most independent critic. Kazin too takes on in this work the major figures of American nineteenth century Literature and he makes us better understand the greatness of Melville, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Dickinson. Kazin as walker in the city as memoirist of his childhood in Brownsville is never dull, is always providing observations and reflections which lead to more inspired perception of literary works, and the world.
I deeply enjoyed this work and attained through it new understanding of great American literary creators I have read and studied before.