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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... moral by our bearing the moral law , the moral sentiment , in our hearts . How does Emerson know all this ? It is because he knows nothing else , and so brings a passion to the subject that is irresistible to people brought up on the ...
... moral sentiment " but his ex- altation of it - in and for itself as the one human attribute that keeps religion alive . There was a certain Yankee smugness in Emerson's cele- bration of the virtue surrounding him which was familiar ...
... moral law in each of us to the one will or mind that runs the world in the same moral spirit . And for Emerson " moral " is all benevolence , " absolute and real . " Good is alone positive . Obviously this is not a description of the ...
Contents
These Strange Minds | 3 |
Hawthorne and His Puritans | 24 |
We Are as Gods | 40 |
Copyright | |
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