Alfred Kazin

Un niño, hijo de modestos trabajadores emigrantes ruso-judíos, camina por las calles de su barrio. Ésas son las señas de identidad del caminante que está a punto de atravesar el puente de Brooklyn para adentrarse en la Nueva York de los años veinte, y esos paseos serán su primer viaje que, como todo viaje digno de tal nombre y el de Alfred Kazin en Un paseante en Nueva York lo es, se convertirá sobre todo en un pasaje hacia el conocimiento en un tiempo vital, el de los años de la infancia y la adolescencia, propicio para los grandes descubrimientos. Kazin, crítico literario, historiador de la cultura, observa la pérdida paulatina de una voz narrativa propia del patrimonio literario judío, que en palabras de su amigo, el político socialista Yaron Ezrahi, «cultiva la soledad, la lírica personal del individuo, la autobiografía, la voz de la primera persona del singular, el reflejo del yo. Del yo individual que narra, pero no como un soldado o como el misionero de un colectivo».Kazin retoma esa tradición y nos enseña su barrio, Brownsville, nos adentra en las calles de la gran ciudad. Un camino que el niño tuvo que recorrer en solitario, el camino del conocimiento elemental: los libros, la lengua y la literatura, la música, la metafísica y la política, la ciudad, el campo y el mundo. Carson McCullers decía de Un paseante en Nueva York, que «era consciente de haber leído una obra maestra».

Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of Americas 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 Yorks innermost intellectual circles; and brilliantly astute observations of the literary accomplishments, atmosphere, and fads of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the context of Americas 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 careshe 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 Kazins at Smith. Kazin shares the particular joy of being in the company of Hannah ArendtHannah 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 contemporariesRobert Frost, Paul Goodman, T. S. Eliot, and othersfreely expressing (and being) themselves. Every image and incident is filtered through Kazins own strong sensibilitypowerfully 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 lifea life superbly told, in a book that will be of fascination to everyone interested in American writing and writers.

An American Procession is a study, on the largest scale, of the major American writers at work during the historically and literarily crucial century that began in the early 1830s, when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a metaphysical revolution, and ended on the eve of the 1930s with the triumph of modernism and the critical recognition of the postponed power of those who had been modern before their time. These one hundred years encompassed a period of unprecedented expansion and promise in the United States, and the work of our novelists, essayists, poets, and historians was the mirror of the nations spirit. The thirty years preceding the Civil War produced the transcendental idealism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman and the dark romanticism of Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. In the years just after World War I, modernism reached its exemplary form in the work of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald, and between the two wars emerged the great realists: Mark Twain, Henry James, Crane, and Dreiser. It is through an exploration of the lives and works of these writerstogether with Emily Dickinson, William James, Henry Adams, and Faulknerthat Kazin maps out a great literary procession shaped by individual genius, by history, and by the implacable American sense of self. With each writer, Alfred Kazin illuminates for us the work, the influences that informed it, and its influence on the work of others. Each figure seems revitalized for us by Kazins acuity and powerful sympathy for his subject. An American Procession, with its intellectual energy, its clarity and breadth, is the brilliantly executed capstone of Kazins already illustrious career and will stand as the most important study of American literature in our time.

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 authors On Native Grounds. --Louis S. AuchinclossThis 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, Kazins 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

A classic interpretation of literature from Americas golden age-including the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. New Preface by the Author; Index.