Alfred Kazin's Books

Alfred Kazin's America

Critical and Personal Writings

By: Alfred Kazin,Ted Solotaroff

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Alfred Kazin's America

Critical and Personal Writings

By: Alfred Kazin,Ted Solotaroff

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.

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Page Count

593

Publisher

Harper Collins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0060512768

ISBN 13

9780060512767

NEW YORK JEW

An Autobiography

By: Alfred Kazin

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NEW YORK JEW

An Autobiography

By: Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of America’s intellectual life in the 20th century, takes us into his own life and times. His autobiography encompasses, within a single large, fluent narrative, a personal story openly told; an inside look at New York’s innermost intellectual circles; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s in the context of America’s shifting political gales. Kazin begins his story in 1940, where we see him first as a young man working for The New Republic, then for Fortune in the time of James Agee. We see him in wartime London; as traveler, after the war, in Italy, Germany, Russia and Israel. We see him as teacher and scholar; as husband and lover; as a writer of profoundly influential critical works; as both observer of and participant in the cultural history of his time. Marvelous scenes of close-up encounters with literary figures abound. The young Kazin, “summoned” to discuss his just-published first book, pays his first visit to the great Edmund Wilson (he was “merely impatient with my book”) and his wife (“she went into my faults with great care…she looked beautiful in the increasing crispness of her analysis”) Mary McCarthy. We see Lionel Trilling (“for Trilling I would always be ‘too Jewish’”); Saul Bellow, soon after Augie March, already projecting a “sense of destiny as a novelist that excited everyone around him”; Sylvia Plath as a student of Kazin’s at Smith. Kazin shares the particular joy of being in the company of Hannah Arendt—Hannah at work, “brimming over with enthusiasm for the New World,” and in the Morningside Drive apartment where she and her husband, Heinrich Bluecher, lived “thought dominated” lives, and were magnets for young writers. We see old and young contemporaries—Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, T. S. Eliot, and others—freely expressing (and being) themselves. Every image and incident is filtered through Kazin’s own strong sensibility—powerfully informed by his Russian immigrant-socialist background, by the resurgent sense of his own Jewishness, and by the “raw power, mass, and volume” of the city he is unfailingly drawn to. New York is itself a central character in his book as in his life—a life superbly told, in a book that will be of fascination to everyone interested in American writing and writers.

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446

Publisher

Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804151261

ISBN 13

9780804151269

A Walker in the City

By: Alfred Kazin

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A Walker in the City

By: Alfred Kazin

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

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Page Count

188

Publisher

HMH

Published Date

ISBN 10

054754636X

ISBN 13

9780547546360

Alfred Kazin's Journals

By: Alfred Kazin

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Alfred Kazin's Journals

By: Alfred Kazin

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one 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, 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, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more. Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

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632

Publisher

Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

030014203X

ISBN 13

9780300142037

New York Jew

By: Alfred Kazin

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New York Jew

By: Alfred Kazin

Brilliant in its assessment of the magazines he worked for, the colleges he taught in, the countries he visited, the women he loved.... His is the voice of a radical conscience, honest, compassionate, and deeply moving". -- Library Journal Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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464

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

039472867X

ISBN 13

9780394728674

Alfred Kazin's Journals

By: Alfred Kazin

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Alfred Kazin's Journals

By: Alfred Kazin

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632

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Yale University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

030014203X

ISBN 13

9780300142037

Writing Was Everything

By: Alfred Kazin

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Writing Was Everything

By: Alfred Kazin

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.”

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161

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674962389

ISBN 13

9780674962385

Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

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Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

The author of On Writing Well presents stories and advice on the writing process from Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, and many more. For anyone who enjoys reading memoirs—or is thinking about writing one—this collection offers a master class from nine distinguished authors: Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson. “Annie Dillard talks of her Pittsburgh childhood and her moment of waking to the world outside. Russell Baker explains why his first draft of Growing Up was so bad that he had to start over again. Alfred Kazin finds that writing about his Brooklyn childhood connected him with the great tradition of Emerson and Whitman. Toni Morrison tells why her fiction uses not only family history but the slave narratives of her people. Lewis Thomas traces the evolution of his singular self from primeval bacteria to contemporary scientist whose drive to be useful is the most fundamental of all biological necessities. . . . Delightful and instructive.” —Library Journal

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237

Publisher

HMH

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547527454

ISBN 13

9780547527451

On Native Grounds

An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

By: Alfred Kazin

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On Native Grounds

An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

By: Alfred Kazin

“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

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573

Publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published Date

ISBN 10

054426374X

ISBN 13

9780544263741

Call It Sleep

A Novel

By: Henry Roth

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Call It Sleep

A Novel

By: Henry Roth

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.

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480

Publisher

Picador

Published Date

ISBN 10

0312424124

ISBN 13

9780312424121

An American Procession

By: Alfred Kazin

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An American Procession

By: Alfred Kazin

In this study of the "crucial century" (1830-1930), Kazin views the major figures in American writing, beginning in the 1830s when Emerson founded a national literature, and ending with modernism--Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald--and the revelation of those who had been modern before their time--Henry Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.

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428

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674031431

ISBN 13

9780674031432

NEW YORK JEW

An Autobiography

By: Alfred Kazin

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NEW YORK JEW

An Autobiography

By: Alfred Kazin

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446

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Knopf

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804151261

ISBN 13

9780804151269

The Inmost Leaf

A Selection of Essays

By: Alfred Kazin

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The Inmost Leaf

A Selection of Essays

By: Alfred Kazin

One of America's foremost literary critics presents twenty-eight essays on American and European writers, including Joyce, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner.

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273

Publisher

Greenwood Publishing Group

Published Date

ISBN 10

0837172810

ISBN 13

9780837172811

God and the American Writer

By: Alfred Kazin

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God and the American Writer

By: Alfred Kazin

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

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289

Publisher

Vintage

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804151229

ISBN 13

9780804151221

Writing Was Everything

By: Alfred Kazin

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Writing Was Everything

By: Alfred Kazin

For more than sixty years Alfred Kazin has been one of the most eloquent witnesses to the literary life of the mind in America. Writing Was Everything is a summation of that life, a story of coming of age as a writer and critic that is also a vibrant cultural drama teeming with such characters as Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell. A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism that moves from New York in the 1930s to wartime England to the postwar South, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. In his encounters with books, Kazin shows us how great writing matters and how it involves us morally, socially, and personally on the deepest level. Whether reflecting on modernism, southern fiction, or black, Jewish, and New Yorker writing or reliving the work of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he gives a penetrating, moving account of literature observed and lived. In his life as a critic, Kazin personifies the lesson that living and writing are necessarily intimate. Writing Was Everything encapsulates the lively wit and authority of this timeless critic's unmistakable voice. It stands as clear 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.

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161

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674417410

ISBN 13

9780674417410

Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

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Inventing the Truth

The Art and Craft of Memoir

By: Alfred Kazin,Russell Baker,Jill Ker Conway,Frank McCourt,Toni Morrison,Eileen Simpson,Henry Louis Gates,Annie Dillard,Ian Frazier

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237

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HMH

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547527454

ISBN 13

9780547527451

On Native Grounds

An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

By: Alfred Kazin

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On Native Grounds

An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

By: Alfred Kazin

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573

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published Date

ISBN 10

054426374X

ISBN 13

9780544263741

A Posthumous History of José Martí

The Apostle and his Afterlife

By: Alfred J. López

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A Posthumous History of José Martí

The Apostle and his Afterlife

By: Alfred J. López

A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and His Afterlife focuses on Martí’s posthumous legacy and his lasting influence on succeeding generations of Cubans on the island and abroad. Over 120 years after his death on a Cuban battlefield in 1895, Martí studies have long been the contested property of opposing sides in an ongoing ideological battle. Both the Cuban nation-state, which claims Martí as a crucial inspiration for its Marxist revolutionary government, and diasporic communities in the US who honor Martí as a figure of hope for the Cuban nation-in-exile, insist on the centrality of his words and image for their respective visions of Cuban nationhood. The book also explores more recent scholarship that has reassessed Martí’s literary, cultural, and ideological value, allowing us to read him beyond the Havana-Miami axis toward engagement with a broader historical and geographical tableau. Martí has thus begun to outgrow his mutually-reinforcing cults in Cuba and the diaspora, to assume his true significance as a hemispheric and global writer and thinker.

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Page Count

323

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Published Date

ISBN 10

1000632725

ISBN 13

9781000632729

Reparations

Pro and Con

By: Alfred L. Brophy

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Reparations

Pro and Con

By: Alfred L. Brophy

Today, the debate over reparations--whether African-Americans should be compensated for decades of racial subjugation--stands as the most racially divisive issue in American politics. In this short, definitive work, Alfred L. Brophy, a leading expert on racial violence, traces the reparations issue from the 1820s to the present in order to assess the arguments on both sides of the current debate. Taking us inside litigation and legislatures past and present; examining failed and successful lawsuits; and exploring reparations actions by legislatures, newspapers, schools, businesses, and truth commissions, this book offers a valuable historical and legal perspective for reparations advocates and critics alike. "A book about reparations and its contentious qualities that is a must-read for all. If you want to know the essence of the debate, this book is for you." --Charles K. Ogletree, Jr., Harvard Law School

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Page Count

306

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198041349

ISBN 13

9780198041344

Social Psychology

By: Alfred R. Lindesmith,Anselm Strauss,Norman K. Denzin

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Social Psychology

By: Alfred R. Lindesmith,Anselm Strauss,Norman K. Denzin

The eighth edition of this classic introduction to social psychology has been significantly revised to take into account changes in the field, such as new theories on sexuality, identity, deviance and the body.

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Page Count

489

Publisher

SAGE

Published Date

ISBN 10

0761907467

ISBN 13

9780761907466

Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature

By: Alfred Habegger

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Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature

By: Alfred Habegger

In this study of the 19th-century American novel, the author demonstrates the imaginative continuity between sentimental and realistic fiction and sets out to establish that realism is the central and preeminent literary type in America, a mode grounded in the tradition of women's popular fiction which shaped the nation's reading habits in the mid-19th century. He examines this feminine literature, with its common technique of symbolizing deeper social conflicts through patterns of courtship, marriage, and gender roles. Contends that Howells and James owe much of their fictional domain to the often-disparaged household dramas of these female precursors.

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Page Count

402

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231053975

ISBN 13

9780231053976

Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get It Published

By: Susan Rabiner,Alfred Fortunato

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Thinking Like Your Editor: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction and Get It Published

By: Susan Rabiner,Alfred Fortunato

Distilled wisdom from two publishing pros for every serious nonfiction author in search of big commercial success. Over 50,000 books are published in America each year, the vast majority nonfiction. Even so, many writers are stymied in getting their books published, never mind gaining significant attention for their ideas—and substantial sales. This is the book editors have been recommending to would-be authors. Filled with trade secrets, Thinking Like Your Editor explains: • why every proposal should ask and answer five key questions; • how to tailor academic writing to a general reader, without losing ideas or dumbing down your work; • how to write a proposal that editors cannot ignore; • why the most important chapter is your introduction; • why "simple structure, complex ideas" is the mantra for creating serious nonfiction; • why smart nonfiction editors regularly reject great writing but find new arguments irresistible. Whatever the topic, from history to business, science to philosophy, law, or gender studies, this book is vital to every serious nonfiction writer.

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273

Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company

Published Date

ISBN 10

039334021X

ISBN 13

9780393340211

A Companion to the American Short Story

By: Alfred Bendixen,James Nagel

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A Companion to the American Short Story

By: Alfred Bendixen,James Nagel

A COMPANION TO THE AMERICAN SHORT STORY A Companion to the American Short Story traces the development of this versatile literary genre over the past two centuries. Written by leading critics in the field, and edited by two major scholars, it explores a wide range of writers, from Edgar Allen Poe and Edith Wharton, at the end of the nineteenth century to important modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Richard Wright. Contributions with a broader focus address groups of multiethnic, Asian, and Jewish writers. Each chapter places the short story into context, focusing on the interaction of cultural forces and aesthetic principles. The Companion takes account of cutting edge approaches to literary studies and contributes to the ongoing redefinition of the American canon, embracing genres such as ghost and detective fiction, cycles of interrelated short fiction, and comic, social and political stories. The volume also reflects the diverse communities that have adopted this literary form and made it their own, featuring entries on a variety of feminist and multicultural traditions. This volume presents an important new consideration of the role of the short story in the literary history of American literature.

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