Alfred Kazin

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Alfred Kazin

(born June 5, 1915, Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S. — died June 5, 1998, New York, N.Y.) U.S. literary critic. His sweeping historical study of modern American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), won him instant recognition. Much of his criticism appeared in Partisan Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. His books include Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), New York Jew (1978), A Writer's America (1988), and God and the American Writer (1997).

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Alfred Kazin

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Kazin, Alfred (kā'zĭn), 1915-98, American critic, b. New York City, grad. College of the City of New York (B.S., 1935) and Columbia (M.A., 1938). Kazin was one of the outstanding literary critics of his time. His first book, the influential and pioneering On Native Grounds (1942), is a critical study of American prose literature from Howells to Faulkner. His later essay collections include The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), Bright Book of Life (1973), An American Procession (1984), Writing Was Everything (1995), and God & the American Writer (1997).

Bibliography

See his autobiographical works, A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and New York Jew (1978), as well as A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996); biography by R. M. Cook (2008).

Works: Works by Alfred Kazin

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(1915-1998)

1942	On Native Grounds. Kazin's debut critical volume provides a masterly interpretation of American prose writers and culture between 1890 and 1940. Lionel Trilling concludes that, based on Kazin's dispassionate and erudite judgment, "our literature of the last forty years seems far from adequate--seems, indeed, almost to have failed." The Brooklyn-born Kazin became an editor at the New Republic the same week that On Native Grounds was published.
1951	A Walker in the City. The first of Kazin's three acclaimed autobiographical works details his Brooklyn childhood. Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978) would follow.
1962	Contemporaries. Kazin collects essays written from the 1950s, sounding a frequent complaint about contemporary novelists creating "subjective fantasies" as an inadequate substitute for "public belief." Edmund Wilson calls the book Kazin's best, but others rank it as his worst.
1965	Starting Out in the Thirties. In the second installment of his memoirs, begun in A Walker in the City (1951), Kazin treats his political and critical coming of age during the 1930s and includes sketches of several prominent figures he met during the period. New York Jew (1978) would continue his story from 1942 to 1970.
1973	Bright Book of Life. Kazin provides an equally accomplished and masterly continuation of his literary history On Native Grounds (1942), treating American fiction from the 1940s to 1971.
1978	New York Jew. Kazin traces literary and political history from 1939 into the 1970s, while also delivering a third installment of the critic's personal history. The book gives profiles of figures such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Robert Lowell.
1984	An American Procession. Kazin provides a survey of American literature from the 1830s to the 1930s.
1988	A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature. Kazin organizes an approach to American literature through the impact of place on the literary imagination of writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Robert Frost, and Ernest Hemingway.
1995	Writing Was Everything. Part memoir and part literary criticism, Kazin's collection gives thumbnail sketches of the literary and critical fashions Kazin had witnessed from the 1930s through the 1990s. The more recent decades come up short in his view. "Only in an age so fragmented," Kazin laments, "so ignorant of the unloseable past working in us, can presumably literate persons speak of Dante, Beethoven, or Tolstoy as 'dead white European males.'"
1996	A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment. Kazin's journals form a memoir of this distinguished scholar of American literature, who ends his book with Henry James's last words: "The starting point of my life has been loneliness."
1997	God and the American Writer. Kazin conducts a literary, theological, and political analysis of writers who can neither accept traditional religion nor feel comfortable in their unbelief. Kazin focuses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner--writers he spent a lifetime studying and writing about. Critics single out Kazin's searching examination of the impact of slavery on these writers' ideas of religion.

Wikipedia: Alfred Kazin

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Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America.

Kazin is regarded as one of "The New York Intellectuals", and like many other members of this group he was born in Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He wrote out of a great passion-- or great disgust -- for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. He was a friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for literary criticism.[1]

Bibliography

On Native Grounds (1942)
A Walker in the City (1951) Autobiographical "New Yorker trilogy", vol. 1
Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) ditto, Vol. 2
Bright Book of Life (1973)
The Portable Blake (1976)
New York Jew (1978) Trilogy, Vol. 3
An American Procession (1984)
A Writer's America (1988)
Writing Was Everything (1995)
A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996)
God and the American Writer (1997)

External links

Kazin obituary by Richard Rodriguez at PBS website

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		Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more
		Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more
		Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
		Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alfred Kazin". Read more