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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... father in slack seasons that the paint looked as if it had been squeezed and cracked into the walls. A large electric bulb hung down the cen- ter of the kitchen at the end of a chain that had been hooked into the ceiling; the old gas ...
... father came home from work she had somehow mysteriously interrupted herself to make supper for us, and the dishes cleared and washed, was back at her machine. WhenI went to bed at night, often she was still there, pounding away at the ...
... father had not worked for nine months, and every Friday evening as we sat down to eat my mother cried out: “BetterI should work all night than we should take from the city!” Spain had a republic at last, and in England Ramsay MacDonald ...
... listened, as he said, to “hard facts”; he even entertained Russian nihilists. Indeed, he now called himself a Socialist, a “theoretical Socialist and a practical aristocrat.” To his father he The Opening Strugglefor Realism 57.
... father he wrote, in 1890, “But it is a comfort to be right theoretically and to be ashamed of one- self practically.” A great change had come over Howells. The 1880s, difficult enough years for Americans learning to live in the ...
Contents
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51 | |
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 |