SOURCE: "On Alfred Kazin (1915–1998)," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLV, No. 12, July 16, 1998, p. 22.

[In the following essay, Delbanco surveys Kazin's life and career, noting his numerous achievements.]

My copy of Alfred Kazin's masterpiece, On Native Grounds (1942), is an English edition printed in accordance with wartime production standards on cheap paper and bound in boards not much more rigid than matchbook covers. It was bought by my mother in a London bookstall in 1943, the year the German army was stopped at Stalingrad expelled from Africa by Montgomery and Patton. In that year, when it began to be possible to imagine an end to the war, my mother (born Barbara Bernstein in Berlin, she had fled in 1936 to England, where she married my father and gave birth to my brothers) turned her thoughts to America as the country in which she wished to to raise her children.

On...