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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... once heard her " It say . grips me ! It grips me ! " Twilight was the bottommost part of the day , the chillest and loneliest time for her . Always so near to her moods , I knew she was fighting some deep inner dread , struggling ...
... once been . The green lamps on each side of the station , the drifters along the steps that led down into the public urinals , even the wire netting in the doors of the patrol wagons whose terrifying backs squatted side by side in the ...
... once; or how I could explain one to the other; but after an afternoon's reading in the “adults'” library on Glenmore Avenue, I would walk past the pushcarts on Belmont Avenue and the market women crying, “Oh you dar- lings! Oh you ...
... once lived in our house. Under the quilt, all women with blond hair and gold wedding rings shining from behind the lat- tices of a summer house soon took on the same look as they comfortably placed one hand over my back, had the same ...
... once , in the middle of the night , he had beaten her so violently that people in the other tenement had been awakened by her screams . But there was nothing definite we knew about them , and after many weeks in which I vainly looked ...
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 |