Alfred Kazin Summary

Alfred Kazin, a prominent critic of American literature and culture since the 1930s, is best known for his ground-breaking study of modern American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), his ongoing cr... Read more

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), and On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writin... Read more

[In the following excerpt, Cohen provides a laudatory review of A Writer's America.] [In A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature] Kazin's landscape of nature is panoramic, ... Read more

[Atlas is an American editor and author of Delmore Schwartz: The Life of An American Poet. In the following review, he offers a generally favorable assessment of Writing Was Everything.] Alfred Kaz... Read more

[Benfey is an American educator and critic. The following is his commendatory review of Writing Was Everything.] The greatest literary critic now at work in America? Hard to name anyone to challeng... Read more

[Berman is an American educator, author, and critic. In the following review, he offers praise for A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment.] As the twentieth century ends, New York Jewish intellectuals ... Read more

[Alter is an American translator, author, and critic. In the following review, he offers a laudatory assessment of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment.] In over half a century of activity as a write... Read more

[In the following review, Herman lauds God and the American Writer.] Alfred Kazin has got to be the most impassioned reader of literature in all of American life right now—a reader so filled... Read more

[In the following review, Scott provides a commendatory analysis of God and the American Writer.] On the last page of New York Jew (1978), the third installment in Alfred Kazin's account of ... Read more

[In the following review, Stone examines God and the American Writer, and offers a laudatory assessment of the volume as well as of Kazin's role as an "Apostle" of American letter... Read more

[Wilentz is an American educator and critic; he is the Drayton-Stockton Professor of History and director of the American studies program at Princeton University. In the following essay, he examines K... Read more