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. |
From inside the book
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... wrote it. So despite all my uneasiness in his house, it always astonished and excited me to sit around that table with him and David and two or three other boys who would listen gravely, munching the biscuit sandwiches and drinking ...
... wrote and edited and lectured indis- criminately on sex , on psychoanalysis , on American literature , on the theory of society , on anthropology . In his youth he had been a semiprofessional baseball player , and had thought of ...
... . Sumner's collapse. It wrote the history of our early modern literature as a war to the death between Henry Van Dyke and Theodore Dreiser, or between H. L. Mencken and the forces of darkness. It applied Preface to On Native Grounds.
... wrote: “You do not blame me too much for not knowing all the answers.” Criticism can never blame any- one too much for not knowing all the answers; it needs first and always to prove itself. ... [1942] THE OPENING STRUGGLE FOR REALISM ...
... wrote to Henry James that it reminded him of a young girl , " and sometimes an old girl , but wild and shy and womanly sweet , always , with a sort of Unitarian optimism in its air . ” He clung to the city distractedly . " New York's ...
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 |
Other editions - View all
Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings Alfred Kazin,Ted Solotaroff No preview available - 2003 |