A literary icon’s “singular and beautiful” memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New Yorker). A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new. With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to “the city,” the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer. “The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.” —The New York Times
In this book, Alfred Kazin, who for more than 30 years has been one of the central figures of America's intellectual life, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York's innermost intellectual circles; strong and intimate revelations of many of the most important writers of the century; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of America's shifting political gales.
"At the time of his death in 1998, Kazin, Alfred was considered on of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life. To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert and adventurous, if often mercurial, intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood ..."--Dust jacket flap.
Blending autobiography, history, and criticism, this book is a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma and stands as testimony to Kazin’s belief that “literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind.”
God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner than any study I have read in the past fifty-five years--that is, since the same author's On Native Grounds. --Louis S. Auchincloss This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War--so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America. An enthralling book by a major writer. "This is a book about the place of God in the imaginative life of a country that for two centuries countenanced slavery and then engaged in a fratricidal war to end it. For Americans no subject is more compelling or, in its entanglement with the deepest roots of the national soul, more terrible. And no one has ever written as incisively, as movingly, or as unforgivingly about it as Alfred Kazin has here." --Louis Menand "In the era of willful obfuscation, Alfred Kazin is the good, clear word, a brilliant scholar and an original reader. His latest book, God and the American Writer, which comes fifty-five years after On Native Grounds, proves he has lost nothing and gives us everything he has." --David Remnick "American writers have been born into all sorts of religious sects, but have had to struggle in solitude to make sense of God. Alfred Kazin, a cosmos unto himself, has written brilliantly and affectingly of how a dozen or so of our finest authors--poets, novelists, philosophers, and one president--endured and illuminated that struggle. Kazin is sometimes passionate, even fierce, especially in his discussions of slavery and of his hero (and mine), Abraham Lincoln. But, as ever, Kazin's writing is tempered by an enormous American empathy and by his sense of irony about our country and its spiritual predicaments. Spare, sharp, and immensely learned, God and the American Writer is the most moving volume of criticism yet by our greatest living critic." --Sean Wilentz
When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves—--and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide, Call It Sleep is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the "dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.
Over 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.
"A stunning book. . . . Perhaps the most evocative reminiscence of a vital corner of the nineteen-thirties that we are likely to get. A beautifully written memoir in which the author's location of himself as a man, an intellectual, and a moral being is interwoven with the chronicle of an era. It is a wonderful book."--Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times "Men lived in the thirties, Kazin is saying, with peculiar stresses, particular faces and one or another kind of relationship to the age which bred them and asked them to respond to it. His book is as admirable a record of how they did that as any we have been given."--Richard Gilman, Dissent
“With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism” (The New York Times). An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive—yet accessible—analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America’s golden age—from 1890 to 1940—included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin’s interpretation. Kazin’s debut was impressive in its scope for such a young author and became a part of his renowned trilogy of literary criticism, which also includes An American Procession and God and the American Writer. “Not only a literary but a moral history . . . The best and most complete treatment we have.” —Lionel Trilling, The Nation
