Alfred Kazin: A Biography

Alfred Kazin: A Biography

by Richard M. Cook
Alfred Kazin: A Biography

Alfred Kazin: A Biography

by Richard M. Cook

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Overview

The first biography of Alfred Kazin–inveterate New Yorker, autobiographer, and perhaps the last great man of American letters in the tradition of Edmund Wilson

Born in 1915 to barely literate Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Alfred Kazin rose from near poverty to become a dominant figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and one of America’s last great men of letters. Biographer Richard M. Cook provides a portrait of Kazin in his public roles and in his frequently unhappy private life. Drawing on the personal journals Kazin kept for over 60 years, private correspondence, and numerous conversations with Kazin, he uncovers the full story of the lonely, stuttering boy from Jewish Brownsville who became a pioneering critic and influential cultural commentator.

Upon the appearance of On Native Grounds in 1942, Kazin was dubbed “the boy wonder of American criticism.” Numerous publications followed, including A Walker in the City and two other memoirs, books of criticism, as well as a stream of essays and reviews that ceased only with his death in 1998. Cook tells of Kazin’s childhood, his troubled marriages, and his relations with such figures as Lionel Trilling, Saul Bellow, Malcolm Cowley, Arthur Schlesinger, Hannah Arendt, and Daniel Bell. He illuminates Kazin’s thinking on political-cultural issues and the recurring way in which his subject’s personal life shaped his career as a public intellectual. Particular attention is paid to Kazin’s sense of himself as a Jewish-American “loner” whose inner estrangements gave him insight into the divisions at the heart of modern culture.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300115055
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 01/28/2008
Pages: 464
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.31(d)

About the Author

Richard M. Cook teaches American literature at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. His articles on Alfred Kazin and other figures in American literature have appeared in American Literary History, Michigan Quarterly, American Studies International, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis.

Table of Contents


Acknowledgments     ix
Brownsville     1
The Thirties: Starting Out     21
The Thirties: On Native Grounds     39
The Break (1942-1945)     72
After the Apocalypse (1945-1950)     107
A Walker in the City     146
Living in the Fifties (1951-1958)     168
The Writer in the World: Part 1 (1958-1963)     209
The Writer in the World: Part 2 (1963-1970)     251
New York Jew (1970-1978)     294
A New Life (1978-1984)     325
Politics     351
"The End of Things" (1984-1998)     376
Notes     413
Index     441
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