Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal WritingsOver 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. |
From inside the book
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... John Sloan's picture of a young girl standing in the wind on the deck of a New York ferryboat — surely to Staten Island , and just about the year of my birth ? looking out to water . It had to be something dark , oily , glazed , faintly ...
... John Dewey, it seemed, had made a greater impression on Eastman than anyone else had, and the more he saw his dream of the Russian Revolution receding from him, the more he called after Marxism to Americanize itself, to come down to ...
... John Dewey, both exponents of “experimental method” and “scientific inquiry,” both intensely committed to the practical and moral necessity of socialism, they disagreed bitterly as to the scientific nature of Marxism. Eastman, deploring ...
... John Dewey and of Karl Marx, both of which so clearly sup- ported each other in the mind of Sidney Hook; you needed only his kind of rationalism. So the choice was easy. Hook won all the arguments, but since he always had to be right ...
... John S. Sumner's collapse. It wrote the history of our early modern literature as a war to the death between Henry Van Dyke and Theodore Dreiser, or between H. L. Mencken and the forces of darkness. It applied Preface to On Native Grounds.
Contents
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Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser | 65 |
Thorstein Veblen | 81 |
The Single Voice of Ralph Ellison | 282 |
Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates | 289 |
The Gift of Feeling | 300 |
The Priest Departs The Divine Literatus Comes | 314 |
Thoreau and American Power | 325 |
The Ghost Sense | 336 |
Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York | 344 |
I Am the Man | 370 |
Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis | 90 |
Willa Cathers Elegy | 105 |
F Scott Fitzgerald | 114 |
Delmore Schwartz | 166 |
The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound | 181 |
The Sound and the Fury | 200 |
Flannery OConnor and Walker Percy | 213 |
The Historian at the Center | 222 |
President Kennedy and Other Intellectuals | 229 |
Cheever Salinger and Updike | 245 |
Bellow Malamud and Roth | 255 |
Capote and Mailer | 270 |
The Almighty Has His Own Purposes | 383 |
Called Back | 402 |
Our Passion Is Our Task | 423 |
Henry Adams and T S Eliot | 432 |
Edmund Wilson at Wellfleet | 455 |
The Burden of Our Time | 467 |
The Directness of Josephine Herbst | 477 |
A Parade in the Rain | 499 |
To Be a Critic | 506 |
Appendix | 523 |
Other editions - View all
Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings Alfred Kazin,Ted Solotaroff No preview available - 2003 |