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God and the American Writer
God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner than any study I have read in the past fifty-five years--that is, since the same author's On Native Grounds.
--Louis S. Auchincloss
This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War--so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America. An enthralling book by a major writer.
"This is a book about the place of God in the imaginative life of a country that for two centuries countenanced slavery and then engaged in a fratricidal war to end it. For Americans no subject is more compelling or, in its entanglement with the deepest roots of the national soul, more terrible. And no one has ever written as incisively, as movingly, or as unforgivingly about it as Alfred Kazin has here."
--Louis Menand
"In the era of willful obfuscation, Alfred Kazin is the good, clear word, a brilliant scholar and an original reader. His latest book, God and the American Writer, which comes fifty-five years after On Native Grounds, proves he has lost nothing and gives us everything he has."
--David Remnick
"American writers have been born into all sorts of religious sects, but have had to struggle in solitude to make sense of God. Alfred Kazin, a cosmos unto himself, has written brilliantly and affectingly of how a dozen or so of our finest authors--poets, novelists, philosophers, and one president--endured and illuminated that struggle. Kazin is sometimes passionate, even fierce, especially in his discussions of slavery and of his hero (and mine), Abraham Lincoln. But, as ever, Kazin's writing is tempered by an enormous American empathy and by his sense of irony about our country and its spiritual predicaments. Spare, sharp, and immensely learned, God and the American Writer is the most moving volume of criticism yet by our greatest living critic."
--Sean Wilentz
--Louis S. Auchincloss
This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War--so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America. An enthralling book by a major writer.
"This is a book about the place of God in the imaginative life of a country that for two centuries countenanced slavery and then engaged in a fratricidal war to end it. For Americans no subject is more compelling or, in its entanglement with the deepest roots of the national soul, more terrible. And no one has ever written as incisively, as movingly, or as unforgivingly about it as Alfred Kazin has here."
--Louis Menand
"In the era of willful obfuscation, Alfred Kazin is the good, clear word, a brilliant scholar and an original reader. His latest book, God and the American Writer, which comes fifty-five years after On Native Grounds, proves he has lost nothing and gives us everything he has."
--David Remnick
"American writers have been born into all sorts of religious sects, but have had to struggle in solitude to make sense of God. Alfred Kazin, a cosmos unto himself, has written brilliantly and affectingly of how a dozen or so of our finest authors--poets, novelists, philosophers, and one president--endured and illuminated that struggle. Kazin is sometimes passionate, even fierce, especially in his discussions of slavery and of his hero (and mine), Abraham Lincoln. But, as ever, Kazin's writing is tempered by an enormous American empathy and by his sense of irony about our country and its spiritual predicaments. Spare, sharp, and immensely learned, God and the American Writer is the most moving volume of criticism yet by our greatest living critic."
--Sean Wilentz
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
Alfred Kazin
110 books44 followersAlfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America.
Kazin is regarded as one of "The New York Intellectuals", and like many other members of this group he was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He wrote out of a great passion-- or great disgust -- for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. He was a friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for literary criticism.
His son is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.
(from wikipedia.org)
Kazin is regarded as one of "The New York Intellectuals", and like many other members of this group he was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He wrote out of a great passion-- or great disgust -- for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. He was a friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for literary criticism.
His son is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.
(from wikipedia.org)
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
June 3, 2025
Religions Of Freedom
The famous American critic, Alfred Kazin, explores in this book various ideas of God and religion in the works of major American writers. The book is not limited to novelists but includes considerations of poets, essayists, philosophers, and Presidents as well. The book begins with the Puritan period of Jonathan Edwards and Anne Bradstreet and concludes with a glance at Thomas Pynchon and John Updike. There are chapters on Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T.S. Elliot, Frost, and Faulkner.
Although the book describes many American approaches to religion, it is not until near its end that Kazin offers something of a definition of what he thinks the search is about. Kazin writes (p. 236) "I think of religion as the most intimate expression of the human heart, as the most secret of personal confessions, where we admit to ourselves alone our fears and our losses, our sense of holy dread and our awe before the unflagging power of a universe that regards us as indeed of 'no account'". Kazin's understanding of religion as personal and individual in character appears to owe a great deal to that of William James in his famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience". Kazin's book thus invites the reader to see religion in personal, noninstitutional terms. The book also warns the reader away (see p. 141) from an "American Civil Religion" in which Americans worship their own culture and history as evidenced by a smug materialism.
There is a great emphasis in the book, as there should be, on slavery, the Civil War and continuing issues of race in America. Here Kazin gives Abraham Lincoln the strongest word, as a leader, a writer, and a religious thinker. Lincoln was a nonchurchgoer and was not religious in any traditional sense. He indeed exemplified a theme that appears to run through this book -- that in the United States people are encouraged to find religion and meaning for themselves outside the bounds of formal creed. Yet, in the Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln offered a profound meditation both on Divine Justice and on Divine Inscrutability and on the related, even though conflicting, themes of retribution and forgiveness.
Most of the book covers familiar authors and familiar books. I enjoyed in particular reading Kazin's discussion of Melville because it focuses on Melville's little-known epic poem "Clarel". This poem is based on Melville's own trip to what was then Palestine and it explores Melville's tortured thought on the relationship between religion and secularism.
This book is a valuable study both of American literature and American religious thought with an emphasis on the effect of freedom and secularism on the nature of religion in the United States. It may encourage the reader to explore, or to think about anew, the nature of American literature and to rethink for him or herself the nature of religious ideals and practices.
Robin Friedman
The famous American critic, Alfred Kazin, explores in this book various ideas of God and religion in the works of major American writers. The book is not limited to novelists but includes considerations of poets, essayists, philosophers, and Presidents as well. The book begins with the Puritan period of Jonathan Edwards and Anne Bradstreet and concludes with a glance at Thomas Pynchon and John Updike. There are chapters on Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T.S. Elliot, Frost, and Faulkner.
Although the book describes many American approaches to religion, it is not until near its end that Kazin offers something of a definition of what he thinks the search is about. Kazin writes (p. 236) "I think of religion as the most intimate expression of the human heart, as the most secret of personal confessions, where we admit to ourselves alone our fears and our losses, our sense of holy dread and our awe before the unflagging power of a universe that regards us as indeed of 'no account'". Kazin's understanding of religion as personal and individual in character appears to owe a great deal to that of William James in his famous book, "The Varieties of Religious Experience". Kazin's book thus invites the reader to see religion in personal, noninstitutional terms. The book also warns the reader away (see p. 141) from an "American Civil Religion" in which Americans worship their own culture and history as evidenced by a smug materialism.
There is a great emphasis in the book, as there should be, on slavery, the Civil War and continuing issues of race in America. Here Kazin gives Abraham Lincoln the strongest word, as a leader, a writer, and a religious thinker. Lincoln was a nonchurchgoer and was not religious in any traditional sense. He indeed exemplified a theme that appears to run through this book -- that in the United States people are encouraged to find religion and meaning for themselves outside the bounds of formal creed. Yet, in the Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln offered a profound meditation both on Divine Justice and on Divine Inscrutability and on the related, even though conflicting, themes of retribution and forgiveness.
Most of the book covers familiar authors and familiar books. I enjoyed in particular reading Kazin's discussion of Melville because it focuses on Melville's little-known epic poem "Clarel". This poem is based on Melville's own trip to what was then Palestine and it explores Melville's tortured thought on the relationship between religion and secularism.
This book is a valuable study both of American literature and American religious thought with an emphasis on the effect of freedom and secularism on the nature of religion in the United States. It may encourage the reader to explore, or to think about anew, the nature of American literature and to rethink for him or herself the nature of religious ideals and practices.
Robin Friedman
July 28, 2019
American literature prior to 1900 has always held little appeal for me. Hawthorne, Twain, Dickenson, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman--maybe it's familiarity and contempt, maybe it's that they are hyped to the point where they seem familiar, and oversold to make up for lack of a long literary tradition. I don't know...but regardless of the cause of my disinterest, the fact remains that I've never cared to really look at them, preferring to be content with what I think I know about them. (Though I can definitively say that Charles Brockden Brown doesn't do anything for me at all)
So here comes Alfred Kazin, whose book The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers first got me to thinking about some of these writers in a way that was more accepting than I had been, and now God and the American Writer, which almost exclusively focuses on American literature of the 19th century (with only Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner outside of it), and makes me actually eager to read a few of these authors whom I really never thought I would bother with (Hawthorne, Dickenson).
I really don't know what the function of literary criticism if it isn't that--to open up possibilities where I might have thought none existed before. Cynthia Ozick may think the critics function is to act as a cultural guardian--to make distinctions between what we should and shouldn't read--and I suppose that can be part of it, though that idea seems to have some inherent pitfalls; but Kazin never sounds as if that is what he's doing (though, admittedly, I haven't read his most famous work, On Native Grounds.) He seems, rather, to be saying: Here is something worth considering.
God and the American Writer has a larger theme to tie it together, though, than simply Kazin's enthusiasm for a particular author. As the title implies, Kazin looks for the influence of God on a dozen writers, and he concentrates on that period of American literature that encompasses Hawthorne to Faulkner; or one might say from the beginning of the end of Puritan America to the end of the end. It is, at any rate, a transitional period, one that includes the Civil War, which may have been the final tipping point in the way Americans understood God. Or maybe not; defining labels and periods like this is too tricky for me--I wouldn't argue if someone disagreed.
Whatever the case, starting with Hawthorne and his Scarlet Letter and ending with Faulkner's oeuvre, Kazin examines the author's personal relationship with God, and how it affected their work. Because of the period covered, slavery becomes almost as important a topic as God, often because theology of the time both justified and rejected it. Interestingly, aside from Harriet Beecher Stowe, most of them were either indifferent to the subject or at most lukewarm.
Kazin is meditative here--I almost hesitate to call this criticism, though he uses all his critical knowledge gained over the years. Given that this was published in 1997 and Kazin died in 1998, maybe it's no wonder he was musing on God through the writers he'd studied for a lifetime. But he never makes it about himself (says the guy who can't help but make himself a character in his reviews), other than the unavoidable aspect of acting as the lens through which we view these writers in this particular light. And because he doesn't interject himself as the subject, he is able to transmit that enthusiasm one last time.
So here comes Alfred Kazin, whose book The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers first got me to thinking about some of these writers in a way that was more accepting than I had been, and now God and the American Writer, which almost exclusively focuses on American literature of the 19th century (with only Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot and William Faulkner outside of it), and makes me actually eager to read a few of these authors whom I really never thought I would bother with (Hawthorne, Dickenson).
I really don't know what the function of literary criticism if it isn't that--to open up possibilities where I might have thought none existed before. Cynthia Ozick may think the critics function is to act as a cultural guardian--to make distinctions between what we should and shouldn't read--and I suppose that can be part of it, though that idea seems to have some inherent pitfalls; but Kazin never sounds as if that is what he's doing (though, admittedly, I haven't read his most famous work, On Native Grounds.) He seems, rather, to be saying: Here is something worth considering.
God and the American Writer has a larger theme to tie it together, though, than simply Kazin's enthusiasm for a particular author. As the title implies, Kazin looks for the influence of God on a dozen writers, and he concentrates on that period of American literature that encompasses Hawthorne to Faulkner; or one might say from the beginning of the end of Puritan America to the end of the end. It is, at any rate, a transitional period, one that includes the Civil War, which may have been the final tipping point in the way Americans understood God. Or maybe not; defining labels and periods like this is too tricky for me--I wouldn't argue if someone disagreed.
Whatever the case, starting with Hawthorne and his Scarlet Letter and ending with Faulkner's oeuvre, Kazin examines the author's personal relationship with God, and how it affected their work. Because of the period covered, slavery becomes almost as important a topic as God, often because theology of the time both justified and rejected it. Interestingly, aside from Harriet Beecher Stowe, most of them were either indifferent to the subject or at most lukewarm.
Kazin is meditative here--I almost hesitate to call this criticism, though he uses all his critical knowledge gained over the years. Given that this was published in 1997 and Kazin died in 1998, maybe it's no wonder he was musing on God through the writers he'd studied for a lifetime. But he never makes it about himself (says the guy who can't help but make himself a character in his reviews), other than the unavoidable aspect of acting as the lens through which we view these writers in this particular light. And because he doesn't interject himself as the subject, he is able to transmit that enthusiasm one last time.
September 26, 2012
Kazin takes a range of diverse authors—Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Eliot, Faulkner, and others—and discusses the ways in which “God” (for whatever value one puts on the word) appears in their works. There’s nary an orthodox believer in the bunch, but each engaged the question (and, increasingly, the “problem”) of the Divine in different ways—from Hawthorne’s haunted, unredemptive Calvinism to Robert Frost’s self-assured appropriation of the Divine as an intellectual problem.
Kazin writes well—sometimes beautifully, sometimes transcendently—about the themes in each writer’s work, but the book as a whole suffers from a lack of unifying themes. Each chapter is an island, complete in itself; there may be callbacks, but there’s no sense of systematic progression, making the book something more in the order of a collection of interrelated essays. Which is fine, except that each essay tends to meander about on the surface of things; we get very little of Hawthorne beyond "The Scarlet Letter"; the discussion of Emerson quickly becomes a discussion of Thoreau; the chapter on Frost devotes perhaps three pages to actual questions of religion, choosing instead to focus on Kazin’s memory of the man. And so on.
Which is not to say that this book is bad; only that it promises much and delivers quite a bit less. As a collection of themed essays, it might even be splendid—but as a discussion of the religious impulse in American literature, it is more than a little lacking.
Kazin writes well—sometimes beautifully, sometimes transcendently—about the themes in each writer’s work, but the book as a whole suffers from a lack of unifying themes. Each chapter is an island, complete in itself; there may be callbacks, but there’s no sense of systematic progression, making the book something more in the order of a collection of interrelated essays. Which is fine, except that each essay tends to meander about on the surface of things; we get very little of Hawthorne beyond "The Scarlet Letter"; the discussion of Emerson quickly becomes a discussion of Thoreau; the chapter on Frost devotes perhaps three pages to actual questions of religion, choosing instead to focus on Kazin’s memory of the man. And so on.
Which is not to say that this book is bad; only that it promises much and delivers quite a bit less. As a collection of themed essays, it might even be splendid—but as a discussion of the religious impulse in American literature, it is more than a little lacking.
January 30, 2026
This survey of American fiction novelists begins with early writers such as Hawthorne and completes with William Faulkner. Its memorable third chapter "Christians and their SLAVES (Harriet Beecher Stowe and others)" elevates the sincerity and passion of Stowe's classic UNCLE_TOM's_CABIN-or_ Life_among_the_lowly ! At that 1840s and 1850s era, Liberation was in the air for Abolitionists and fervent Evanglical post-millennialists like this pre-feminist Novelist for the masses (Americans and abroad). Highly worthwhile analysis by Alfred Kazin for those who love such a literature. 5* out of 5.
November 25, 2017
All those old writers were doubters, it seems, engaged in figuring out their own things.
August 6, 2016
Oh man this is a good one. The relevance of the chapters to the title slackens a bit towards the back of the book, but this flagging relationship gets a proper jump-start with Faulkner right at the end.
The chapters I liked best were probably Melville and Emerson's. Excerpts from Melville's travel journal in the Holy Land make you feel one hell of a way, especially with the grounding Kazin gives to Melville's religious struggles. The Emerson chapter contains probably the clearest crystallization of the book's theme. Regardless of Emerson's impact on religious thought and thought generally in his day—popular thought—, the kind of religion he practiced and the trend it exemplified seem to have best predicted the direction of American ideology/identity writ large. He's also the king of bon mots, and reading Emerson in his element, with Kazin in his element unfolding Emerson, is a treat.
The chapters I liked best were probably Melville and Emerson's. Excerpts from Melville's travel journal in the Holy Land make you feel one hell of a way, especially with the grounding Kazin gives to Melville's religious struggles. The Emerson chapter contains probably the clearest crystallization of the book's theme. Regardless of Emerson's impact on religious thought and thought generally in his day—popular thought—, the kind of religion he practiced and the trend it exemplified seem to have best predicted the direction of American ideology/identity writ large. He's also the king of bon mots, and reading Emerson in his element, with Kazin in his element unfolding Emerson, is a treat.
May 29, 2012
I came for the section on Lincoln, I stayed for pretty much everything else. Kazin is a bit of a meanderer in his writing, so it was sometimes hard to get a good grasp on his theses and how he believed that each of these writers used either their relationships with God or their ideas of God in their writing, but some interesting conclusions nonetheless. Fair warning - the content is a bit heady in its style; this is writing that you have to focus on to really understand where it's going.
March 7, 2016
Kazin’s last book, a profound exploration of the American religion as it has evolved through the works of major American theologians, poets, philosophers, novelists, and politicians. He sheds new light on just how crucial the question of God has been to our greatest creative minds, and how their struggles have been passed down to us. An interesting pairing to this work would be Harold Bloom’s “The American Religion,” another fascinating exploration of our particular national obsession.
July 19, 2014
Alfred Kazin is telling us how religion affects our culture now that nobody who is anybody believes in a god. There seems to me to be just one problem with this argument.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews