Alfred Kazin's America

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.

Alfred Kazin was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York.

Preface	p. xiii
Introduction	p. xv
Home is Where One Starts From
The Kitchen	p. 3
"Beyond!"	p. 8
Mrs. Solovey	p. 14
Yeshua	p. 25
The Literary Life
Brownsville: 1931	p. 31
The New Republic: 1934	p. 36
At V. F. Calverton's: 1936	p. 40
The Age of Realism
Preface to On Native Grounds	p. 51
The Opening Struggle for Realism	p. 56
Two Educations: Edith Wharton and Theodore Dreiser	p. 65
An Insurgent Scholar: Thorstein Veblen	p. 81
The New Realism: Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis	p. 90
Willa Cather's Elegy	p. 105
All the Lost Generations: F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos	p. 114
The Literary Life
Provincetown, 1940: Bertram Wolfe, Mary McCarthy, Philip Rahv	p. 159
Delmore Schwartz	p. 166
Saul Bellow and Lionel Trilling	p. 170
Contemporaries
The Fascination and Terror of Ezra Pound	p. 181
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury	p. 200
Southern Isolates: Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy	p. 213
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: The Historian at the Center	p. 222
President Kennedy and Other Intellectuals	p. 229
Professional Observers: Cheever, Salinger, and Updike	p. 245
The Earthly City of the Jews: Bellow, Malamud, and Roth	p. 255
The Imagination of Fact: Capote and Mailer	p. 270
The "Single Voice" of Ralph Ellison	p. 282
Two Cassandras: Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates	p. 289
James Wright: The Gift of Feeling	p. 300
Departed Friends
The Intoxicating Sense of Possibility: Thomas Jefferson at Monticello	p. 307
Emerson: The Priest Departs, The Divine Literatus Comes	p. 314
Thoreau and American Power	p. 325
Hawthorne: The Ghost Sense	p. 336
"Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York"	p. 344
Walt Whitman: I Am the Man	p. 370
Lincoln: The Almighty Has His Own Purposes	p. 383
Emily Dickinson: Called Back	p. 402
Creatures of Circumstance: Mark Twain	p. 407
William and Henry James: Our Passion Is Our Task	p. 423
The Death of the Past: Henry Adams and T. S. Eliot	p. 432
The Literary Life
Edmund Wilson at Wellfleet	p. 455
Hannah Arendt: The Burden of Our Time	p. 467
The Directness of Josephine Herbst	p. 477
Saving My Soul at the Plaza	p. 481
Summing Up
A Parade in the Rain	p. 499
To Be a Critic	p. 506
Appendix	p. 523
Index	p. 527
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

FREE SHIPPING

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

Alfred Kazin's America

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials