Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings – An Outsider's Six-Decade Literary Legacy Including Portraits of Bellow, Wilson, and Arendt

by Alfred Kazin, Ted Solotaroff

“Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend. . . . 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” — The New Yorker Over the course of 60 years, Alfred Kazin’s writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates and including such unexpected figures as Abraham Lincoln, William James and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that he succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters. At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist. Editor Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin’s three classic memoirs to accompany these critical writings. The excerpts include 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. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that he regarded as his heritage and endeavored to pass on.

Genres: Essays, Literary Criticism, Criticism

592 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2003

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

[Joe Mossa · Rating 3 out of 5]

i enjoyed much of this book although there were too many details for an amateur literature major like me.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would think his self-imposed relegation to the fumigated discourse of American literature would have imposed a set of impossible strictures on his analysis of world-political events. Apparently not.