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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... social science " and literature with the same eager knowingness , as if he were really the heir of Diderot and Bernard Shaw , he nevertheless , for all his bounce , seemed plaintive and absent - minded , like a man who has unaccountably ...
... Social Revolutionaries, German Marxists who had known Engels and [Eduard] Bernstein, American Socialists and libertarian anarchists, ex-Communists who had fallen off the train of history or had been pushed off it somewhere up the line ...
... social democratic , libertarian , and dogmatic , a man with a heavy bald front and a face shaped like a stone by every obstacle in his path . He had gone through everything , that man , he had done battle in many factions and groups ...
... social engineering , unfortu- nately diffused with the ideological cant that Marx had absorbed from Hegel . With his mane of white hair , his conscious good looks , and his easy laugh , Eastman made his admiration of Lenin's " social ...
... social achievements of eighteen years from the ominous Stalinist ter- ror. It was his last effort; within a year Eastman would be writing in total rejection of the Revolution that he had gone with uplifted heart to describe for his ...
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 |