Alfred Kazin's America

Alfred Kazin's America PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060512768
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 593

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Book Description
Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. This son of Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." Editor Ted Solotaroff hasselected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. 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.

Alfred Kazin's America

Alfred Kazin's America PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060512768
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 593

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. This son of Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." Editor Ted Solotaroff hasselected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. 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.

Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin PDF Author: René Verwaaijen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description


Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin PDF Author: Richard M. Cook
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300145047
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 462

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Book Description
Born in 1915 to barely literate Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Alfred Kazin rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and one of Americas last great men of letters. Biographer Ri

God and the American Writer

God and the American Writer PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804151229
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
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 subjects: 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

Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin PDF Author: Renatus Wilhelmus Maria Verwaaijen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description


NEW YORK JEW

NEW YORK JEW PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0804151261
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of America’s intellectual life in the 20th century, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses, within a single large, fluent narrative, a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York’s innermost intellectual circles; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s in the context of America’s shifting political gales. Kazin begins his story in 1940, where we see him first as a young man working for The New Republic, then for Fortune in the time of James Agee. We see him in wartime London; as traveler, after the war, in Italy, Germany, Russia and Israel. We see him as teacher and scholar; as husband and lover; as a writer of profoundly influential critical works; as both observer of and participant in the cultural history of his time. Marvelous scenes of close-up encounters with literary figures abound. The young Kazin, “summoned” to discuss his just-published first book, pays his first visit to the great Edmund Wilson (he was “merely impatient with my book”) and his wife (“she went into my faults with great care…she looked beautiful in the increasing crispness of her analysis”) Mary McCarthy. We see Lionel Trilling (“for Trilling I would always be ‘too Jewish’”); Saul Bellow, soon after Augie March, already projecting a “sense of destiny as a novelist that excited everyone around him”; Sylvia Plath as a student of Kazin’s at Smith. Kazin shares the particular joy of being in the company of Hannah Arendt—Hannah at work, “brimming over with enthusiasm for the New World,” and in the Morningside Drive apartment where she and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, lived “thought dominated” lives, and were magnets for young writers. We see old and young contemporaries—Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, T. S. Eliot, and others—freely expressing (and being) themselves. Every image and incident is filtered through Kazin’s own strong sensibility—powerfully informed by his Russian immigrant-socialist background, by the resurgent sense of his own Jewishness, and by the “raw power, mass, and volume” of the city he is unfailingly drawn to. New York is itself a central character in his book as in his life—a life superbly told, in a book that will be of fascination to everyone interested in American writing and writers.

AN AMERICAN PROCESSION

AN AMERICAN PROCESSION PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 080415127X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism and the critical recognition of the “postponed power” of those who had been modern before their time. These one hundred years encompassed a period of unprecedented expansion and promise in the United States, and the work of our novelists, essayists, poets, and historians was the mirror of the nation’s spirit. The thirty years preceding the Civil War produced the transcendental idealism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and the dark romanticism of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. In the years just after World War I, modernism reached its exemplary form in the work of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald, and between the two wars emerged the great realists: Mark Twain, Henry James, Crane, and Dreiser. It is through an exploration of the lives and works of these writers—together with Emily Dickinson, William James, Henry Adams, and Faulkner—that Kazin maps out a great literary procession shaped by individual genius, by history, and by the implacable American sense of self. With each writer, Alfred Kazin illuminates for us the work, the influences that informed it, and its influence on the work of others. Each figure seems revitalized for us by Kazin’s acuity and powerful sympathy for his subject. An American Procession, with its intellectual energy, its clarity and breadth, is the brilliantly executed capstone of Kazin’s already illustrious career and will stand as the most important study of American literature in our time.

A Writer's America

A Writer's America PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Examines the American landscape, wild, pastoral, or urbanized, and its influence on poets, essayists, and novelists.

Alfred Kazin's Journals

Alfred Kazin's Journals PDF Author: Richard M. Cook
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030017165X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 799

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Book Description
At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life. To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment PDF Author: Alfred Kazin
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
While leading an active life, Kazin has faithfully kept diaries from the late 1930s up to the present. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment offers readers the best of thousands of pages of his journals, comprising an extraordinary picture of intellectual, social, political, and even celebrity life - including such figures as Bernard Berenson, Josephine Herbst, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Hannah Arendt - during the past five and a half decades. Kazin candidly reflects on his four marriages, his feelings about the Holocaust, his criticism of American society, the pleasure and stimulation of reading good writers (Simone Weil, Ignazio Silone, Joseph Conrad, and Saul Bellow, among others), his need to pray, his travels abroad and within the United States, and more.