4to - over 9Â¾" - 12" Tall. First edition bound in black cloth. A Fine copy in dj.

Our New York

History

KAZIN, Alfred

Americas

HarperCollins, Publishers

While leading an active life, Kazin has faithfully kept diaries from the late 1930s up to the present. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment offers readers the best of thousands of pages of his journals, comprising an extraordinary picture of intellectual, social, political, and even celebrity life - including such figures as Bernard Berenson, Josephine Herbst, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Hannah Arendt - during the past five and a half decades. Kazin candidly reflects on his four marriages, his feelings about the Holocaust, his criticism of American society, the pleasure and stimulation of reading good writers (Simone Weil, Ignazio Silone, Joseph Conrad, and Saul Bellow, among others), his need to pray, his travels abroad and within the United States, and more.

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Harpercollins

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's America: Critical and Personal Writings

Literature & Fiction

Solotaroff, Ted

United States

Harper-perennial

From the journals of one of our most distinguished critics comes an extraordinary panorama of the intellectual, social and political culture of the last half century. Written with the vividness and power of first-rate fiction, it brings to life the great artists and thinkers who shaped the times, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Hannah Arendt, and shares Kazin's insights on politics, literature, Jewish life after the Holocaust and American society. It is an immensely rich and resonant memoir from an observer whose eloquence can imbue each moment lived with a lifetime of thought and passion.

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that in his books, essays, and reviews, Kazin succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters, the one who kept closest track of its proceedings, its history, its symbiotic relationship with American society, and its relations with other Western literatures. He did so out of a particularly passionate concern for the significance and well-being of our literary heritage. The America that was mostly a political and cultural position-taking for his fellow New York intellectuals was for Kazin a lifelong possession and a complex fate. His working title for his final book, God and the American Writer, which dealt mostly with nineteenth-century authors, was "Absent Friends."
At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he typically put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." To indicate the development of this charged point of view, Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. These excerpts also provide the pleasure of his sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod literary milieus and of such figures as Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt.
The selections in Alfred Kazin's America follow the course of his career. They are introduced by the editor's substantial essay, which connects the youth to the man and both to the critic, and draws upon Solotaroff's own relations with him. This close joining of the personal to the critical seeks to pass on and reactivate a great American critic's presence and legacy.
As our sense of the American past continues to dry up and threatens to blow away in the heavy winds of change, those writers who can make our heritage come alive again and challenge us become all the more essential. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that takes us back to Emerson and forward through our literature to the better part of our own Americanism.

Harper

A reviewer suggests the book may have been intended "as a primer, perhaps, for a literature survey that wanted to take a closer look at the essay form. As such, it contains highly polished examples covering a wide range of topics, from sociology to psychology, and from memoir to cultural critique."

The open form;: Essays for our time

Harcourt,brace & World

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

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (A Harvest Book)

History & Criticism

Harcourt

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

The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers

Essays & Correspondence

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

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature (Harvest Book)

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (Harvest/HBJ Book)

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Books by KAZIN, Alfred

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by KAZIN, Alfred. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Our New York

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings

The open form;: Essays for our time

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (A Harvest Book)

The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature (Harvest Book)

On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (Harvest/HBJ Book)