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. |
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... everything but courage , the blind resolution to live . In the light of that mourning - candle , there were ranged around me how many dead and dying - how many eras of pain , of exile , of dispersion , of cringing before the powers of ...
... everything, there was a defiance of the family principle, of us, of their own poverty and apathy, that encouraged me to despise our values as crude and provincial. Only in movies and in The Sheik did people abandon the world for love ...
... Everything that now made her so lustrous to me—her air of not being quite placed in life, her gentle aloofness, her secret carnality—was miss- ing in her husband's appearance. The store went from bad to worse, and he seemed to plant ...
... everything ! But that is a mistake , I can assure you ! It is necessary to speak , to speak ! Think how you would be happy to speak French well ! To speak a foreign language is to depart from yourself . Do you not think it is tiresome ...
... everything in sight now loosed itself from its containing hard edges in space and came back to me as a single line of words burning across the page. Half past five on a summer day—at my back I could smell soupgreens being put into the ...
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 |
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Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings Alfred Kazin,Ted Solotaroff No preview available - 2003 |