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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... lived in a kitchen to which four other rooms were annexed. My mother, a “home” dressmaker, had her work- shop in the kitchen. She told me once that she had begun dressmaking in Poland at thirteen; as far back as I can remember, she was ...
... lived in Palestine, France, Italy. They were “professional” people, “enlightened”—she, it was rumored, had even been a physician or “some kind of scientist,” we could never discover which. The greatest mystery was why they had come to ...
... lived elsewhere, and this made them mysterious. Through some unfathomable act of will, they had chosen us. But for me they were beyond all our endless gossip and speculation about them. They fascinated me simply because they were so ...
... lived out of Brownsville. They came into my life proud and compassionate, recognizing me by a secret sign, whispering through subterranean channels of sympathy: “Alfred! Old boy! What have they done to you!” Walking about, I learned so ...
... lived, they gave me a happiness that reverberated in my mind long after I had reached our street and had turned on the first worn step of our stoop for one last proud annihilating glance back at the block. in The Soloveys came into my ...
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 |
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Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings Alfred Kazin,Ted Solotaroff No preview available - 2003 |