On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

by Alfred Kazin

A classic interpretation of literature from America's golden age-including the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. New Preface by the Author; Index.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Criticism, Nonfiction, History, American, Books About Books, Americana

541 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Alfred 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)

Reviews

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is sickness in contemporary literature, a very great sickness; but it is hardly self-willed, and it is bound up with the situation of contemporary humanity.
from the last chapter, written during the second World War


Of all the books I have under the general heading of American Literature, this is the last one I would ever want to lose.

That means that I would give up all the novels, all the other books by and about American authors, and keep this as the last one.

Why?

Because by dipping into Kazin's book, I would be reminded of, be able to read at least bits and pieces about, all those authors and books that I've loved.

I'm constantly pulling this book off the shelf it sits on in the same room as my desk, the television, a lot of books - the room that I spend more time in than any other room in the house to check the index (a good one) and read about an author that I've become curious about, or am currently reading a book by.

But don't think this book is a pre-Wiki listing of authors, the books they wrote, and brief facts about each. Kazin was a literary and cultural historian of America. (The primary period covered by this book is 1890 to 1940.) What he does here is discuss and describe movements in American literature and culture in this half century. The pages devoted to a single author are like a word-painting, which evokes in the mind of the reader a portrait of the artist.

These portraits are built on facts, of course - but the colors Kazin uses to paint the pictures of a movement and its artists are chosen not only by his perception of facts but also, inevitably, by his own views as a critic.

The edition I have was published in 1956. I only noticed today, after all these years, that it is abridged. I have no idea what or how much is missing from the 1942 edition. Perhaps I will try to find out. It has a postscript that Kazin wrote in 1955, thirteen years after the book was first published. The postscript is very brief, only five pages, so really doesn’t add more than an overview of those years.

Anyway, here are the chapters in my edition.

PART I: THE SEARCH FOR REALITY (1890-1917)
1. The Opening Struggle for Realism
2. American Fin de Siecle
3. Two Educations: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser
4. Progressivism: The Superman and the Muckrake
5. Progressivism: Some Insurgent Scholars
6. The Joyous Season

PART II: THE GREAT LIBERATION (1918-1929)
7. The Postwar Scene
8. The New Realism: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis
9. Elegy and Satire: Willa Cather and Ellen Glasgow
10. Liberals and New Humanists
11. Into the Thirties: All the Lost Generations

PART III: THE LITERATURE OF CRISIS (1930-1940)
12. The Revival of Naturalism
13. Criticism at the Poles
14. The Rhetoric and the Agony
15. America! America!

The book is hardly the last word on Faulkner, or Hemingway – on Sinclair Lewis, or Jack London - on Henry James, John Steinbeck, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, H.L. Menken, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, or any other of the writers mentioned.

But anyone interested in American literature of this period, and the historical and cultural forces that helped shape that literature, cannot possibly do better than to have a copy of this book at their side as they explore that subject, and read the novels of America - of America as it grew up, found its place in the modern world, and (afterwards) discovered the immensity of the problems it still had yet (and has yet) to confront.


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Previous review: King John
Next review: Parkinson's Law
Older review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Previous library review: Down on the Farm
Next library review: Italy in Mind

[Andrew]

I feel like no one reads Alfred Kazin anymore (at time of writing, 570 ratings for A Walker in the City, a mere 58 for On Native Grounds). Once one of the kings of American criticism, I am reading him at a time when there are no more critics, when everyone erects their individual mind-palaces, and who, in On Native Grounds, spent a lot of time evaluating the other critics, forgotten men with forgotten theses, remembered only as footnotes to footnotes. Hell, a lot of the primary authors he references are forgotten too -- who nowadays reads Howells or Cabell? These are guys I only really know about from references in Sinclair Lewis books, and not that many people read Sinclair Lewis. But here's the thing. Kazin makes you want to read them, makes you delight in thinking about literature and American landscape and the vision of the republic (in a totally unironic way, not some creepy John Bolton way). Unfortunately, many of Kazin's compadres wound up supporting the worst of the worst, the intellectual antecedents to the John Boltons and their many pupate creeps that slither the streets of Georgetown at night, and Kazin was horrified by their conservative turn. Too bowtie'd for the modern American cultural left (despite the fact that his son edits Dissent), too truly freethinking for the cultural right (despite the occasional nod from the dorks at the National Review and similar enterprises, the sons of the people he come up with in New York), he is slowly becoming one of his own forgotten men with forgotten theses. My only hope is that one day someone in Jacobin will write a thoughtful essay about the Left rediscovering Kazin, and that a few other people will pick up books like these.

[Erik Burge · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you happen to be jonesing for a vigorous, stouthearted analysis of the generative forces (both creative and critical) that influenced the course of American literature between the tail end of the Victoria Era until the onset of World War II, then you won't go wrong with this one.

Navigating the analytic terrain in this exceedingly in-depth tome wasn't necessarily a stroll through the park, even for a dyed-in-the-wool Lost Generation/Hard-Boiled fan boy like me. But to Kazin's enduring credit, he never once left me standing too deeply in the dark.

Even as I struggled to sort my way through brushy entanglements of Gilded Age literary theory or found myself enduring the sundry trials of tribulations of John Dos Passos' narrative "hell pits", there always seemed to be just enough light shining up ahead to keep me on course around the next bend.

And there are quite a few bends. But the deeper you wend your way into the chasm, the more clearly and meaningfully the geological strata come zooming into view. Kazin's perspective is trenchantly a scholarly one, but he is congenial with his prose and remarkably plebeian -- almost tour guide-like -- in his summations.

From the cloistered novelistic constructions of Henry James and Edith Wharton to the feral wilderness expanses of William Faulkner and Henry Miller, the road veers compellingly from one emergent vista to the next.

"The book has no real scale;" Kazin remarks of The Great Gatsby. "It does not rest on any commanding vision, nor is it in any sense a major tragedy. But it is a great flooding moment, a moment's intimation and penetration; and as Gatsby's disillusion becomes felt at the end, it strikes like a chime through the mind."

That's precisely what On Native Grounds did for me: struck a chime through my mind. But I hardly walked away from it feeling disillusioned. On the contrary, I walked away feeling like I've still got plenty more terrain to explore.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely has a critical survey been this much fun to read. I particularly liked the preface, opening, and closing chapters. My favorite of Kazin's period surveys is his chapter on the Lost Generation.

[Tuck · Rating 5 out of 5]

worth reading, if just for the chapter on dos passos, hemingway, and fitzgerald. rather dense at times, but great all in all essays on books and writers.

[Avery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always interesting, sometimes wrong, and wildly ambitious, Kazin's sweeping study of American literature from 1890 to 1940 is a fascinating historical artifact as much as it is a helpful analysis. Kazin masterfully weaves the struggle for an American national literature with the battle for democracy and the socio-political circumstances of the US and world at large.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the edtion I now have, but it is a reprint that is considerably older than 1995. If you're into modern American Lit (though "modern" may no longer apply, since this book only covers up to 1945 or so), this is necessary reading. Kazin was a great writer, so this study never drags.

[Mina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read!

[Humphrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kazin's book is a quite selective historical survey of literature from 1890 to 1940, but it frequently includes critics and social sciences under that heading. Like many literary studies from the early 20th century, it's much more about the particular narrative it strings together than it is about specific analysis, which is often offhand and without evidence. It's organized, if anything, around a loose, idiosyncratic conception of "realism" that is a cross between a modernist sense of getting at "the real" and a Marxist sensibility for re-attaching real socio-economic conditions. Now, that isn't to say Kazin is a modernist - he in fact has distaste for several of them - but instead that he traces these conceptions of "realism" and attempts to assess them by their own standards. Perhaps the most unique thing Kazin does here, both for his own time and for modern criticism until quite recently, is assert the continuity between the decades immediately preceding (and not just the ephemeral bibelots, mind you) and immediately succeeding WWI (something the folks of the 1920s adamantly denied).

[Alcazar QZR · Rating 2 out of 5]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14525729