Description

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“Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend. . . . Ted Solotaroff’s selection of his work is a fitting tribute, a book that will be a starting point for further reading, both of Kazin and of the native writers to whom he devoted himself” — The New Yorker

Over the course of 60 years, Alfred Kazin’s writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates and including such unexpected figures as Abraham Lincoln, William James and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that he succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters. At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist.

Editor Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin’s three classic memoirs to accompany these critical writings. The excerpts include sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod literary milieus and of such figures as Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt.

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.

About the Author

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Alfred Kazin was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book, On Native Grounds, published in 1942, revolutionized critical perceptions of American literature. It was followed by many more books of essays and criticism, including A Walker in the City and, most recently, Writing Was Everything.

Kazin has taught at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1996, he received the Truman Capote Literary Trust's first Lifetime Award in Literary Criticism.

Kazin lives in New York City.

Ted Solotaroff is a well-known editor and critic. His first memoir, Truth Comes in Blows, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. His second, First Loves, was recently published by Seven Stories Press.

Praise For…

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“Kazin possessed a gift for writing and an uncanny ability to explain why a certain writer succeeded or failed, and why it mattered. . . . As a writer deeply in the American grain, he reminds us again and again, in his expansive sense of possibility, that passion and hope are the best native virtues.” — Los Angeles Times

“A book for which everyone interested in good writing in America should be grateful.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Alfred Kazin’s combustible soul thought God might yet be sought in American literature.” — Paul Berman, New York Times Book Review

“Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend…Ted Solotaroff’s selection of his work is a fitting tribute, a book that will be a starting point for further reading, both of Kazin and of the native writers to whom he devoted himself” — The New Yorker

“An enthralling introduction to the work of a man who ‘lived to read’ and conveyed that passion to his own readers for half a century.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A distinct pleasure.” — San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“This most thoughtfully chosen collection is a fitting monument to the man and his work.” — William F. Pritchard, Washington Times

“[Kazin is] one of a handful of acknowledged arbiters of critical judgment in American.” — Thomas L. Jefferes, Commentary

“Carved from more than 50 years of Kazin’s essays and memoirs, this posthumous anthology traces the biographical and intellectual arc of one of America’s finest—and most versatile—literary critics.” — New York Times Book Review