Alfred Kazin
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Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. He wrote often about the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America.[1]
Early life[]
Like many of the other New York Intellectuals, Alfred Kazin was the son of Jewish immigrants,[2] born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and a graduate of the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were socialists.
Career[]
Kazin was deeply affected by his peers' subsequent disillusion with socialism and liberalism.[3] Adam Kirsch writes in The New Republic that "having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity".[3]
He wrote out of a great passion—or great disgust—for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, which carries a cash reward of $100,000.[4] As of 2014, the only other person to have won the award was George Steiner.[5]
Personal life[]
Kazin was friends with Hannah Arendt.[6]
Kazin's son from his second marriage is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.[7] Alfred Kazin married his third wife, the writer Ann Birstein, in 1952, and they divorced in 1982; their daughter is Cathrael Kazin,[7] who is a managing partner at Volta Learning Group.[8]
Kazin married a fourth time, and is survived by his widow, the writer Judith Dunford.
Death[]
Kazin died in Manhattan on his 83rd birthday.
Bibliography[]
Author[]
- On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942)
- The Open Street (1948)
- A Walker in the City (1951)
- The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers (1955)
- Contemporaries: Essays on Modern Life and Literature (1963)
- Starting Out in the Thirties (1965)
- Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (1973)
- New York Jew (1978)
- The State of the Book World, 1980: Three Talks (1980), with and Ernest L. Boyer
- An American Procession: The Major American Writers from 1830 to 1930—The Crucial Century (1984)
- A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature (1988)
- Our New York (1989), co-authored with David Finn
- The Emmy Parrish Lectures in American Studies (1991)
- Writing Was Everything (1995)
- A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)
- God and the American Writer (1997)
- Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings (2003) edited and with an introduction by Ted Solotaroff
- Alfred Kazin's Journals (2011), selected and edited by Richard M. Cook
Editor (selected)[]
- The Portable Blake The Viking Press 1946, reprinted many times between 1959 and 1975; Penguin Books 1976, reprinted 1977, ISBN 0140150269
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work
- The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, co-edited with Charles Shapiro
- Emerson: A Modern Anthology, co-edited with Daniel Aaron
- The Works of Anne Frank, co-edited with Ann Birstein
- The Open Form: Essays for Our Time
- Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
References[]
- ^ Wilborn Hampton (6 June 1998). "Alfred Kazin, the Author Who Wrote of Literature and Himself, Is Dead at 83". The New York Times. p. B 9. Retrieved 17 November 2020.
- ^ Garner, Dwight (May 26, 2011). "A Lifetime of Anxiety and Lust". New York Times. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ Jump up to: a b Kirsch, Adam (October 26, 2011). "The Inner Clamor". The New Republic (review of Alfred Kazin's Journals). Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ "First Capote Award Goes to Alfred Kazin". New York Times. January 10, 1996. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ "Alfred Kazin Papers – Overview". New York Public Library. Retrieved 15 February 2020.
- ^ Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (2004), Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, pp. 263, 360
- ^ Jump up to: a b Roberts, Sam (May 29, 2017). "Ann Birstein, Memoirist and Novelist, Dies at 89". New York Times. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
- ^ "Cathrael Kazin". Volta Learning Group. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
External links[]
- Alfred Kazin, champion of American literature: An appreciation by Fred Mazelis on the World Socialist Web Site
- “Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Alfred Kazin”, with an Introduction & Commentary by , Samtiden 1 - 2005, Retrieved 2 September 2014
- Alfred Kazin Papers at the New York Public Library
- 1915 births
- 1998 deaths
- American literary critics
- City College of New York alumni
- Jewish American writers
- People from Brownsville, Brooklyn
- Writers from New York (state)
- Journalists from New York City
- 20th-century American non-fiction writers
- Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni