Customer Reviews

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings

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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.