God & the American WriterGod 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." |
From inside the book
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... Emerson's saying that by the religious sentiment " is the universe made safe and habitable , not by science or power . " A century after Emerson , the French biologist Jacques Monod remarked , “ Religion conceived the world so we could ...
... Emerson seems to have done with Jesus . The perfect man has become a figure of speech . As Emerson now goes after the Church , ridiculing its pretensions to authority , Jesus as its glorified fig- urehead becomes as dispensable as ...
... Emerson by his total compe- tence , which entails freedom from mere scruples . Napoleon is history . Nothing is now said of the moral sentiment in history , for the great man decides everything by ignoring purely moral issues . In War ...
Contents
These Strange Minds | 3 |
Hawthorne and His Puritans | 24 |
We Are as Gods | 40 |
Copyright | |
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