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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... faith absolute . She had mind . Most Dickinsons before her thought heaven real enough - and on the whole thought well enough of themselves to sustain faith that heaven expected them . The Dickinsons came to Massachusetts in the 1620s ...
... Faith was absolute or , in the name of the only Deity , loyalty to one's history . Kafka to Gustav Janouch : " He who has faith cannot talk about it ; he who has no faith should not talk about it . ” What a difference from Alfred North ...
... faith that it used to rest on — that is , the belief in personal immortality - has been destroyed . This demands faith , which is a different thing from credulity . ” Credulity serves doctrine . Faith is nothing but itself , is what ...
Contents
These Strange Minds | 3 |
Hawthorne and His Puritans | 24 |
We Are as Gods | 40 |
Copyright | |
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