SOURCE: A review of Writing Was Everything, in World Literature Today, Vol. 70, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 410-11.

[In the following review, Brown provides a summary of Writing Was Everything.]

First presented as a series of lectures at Harvard in 1994, Writing Was Everything consists of three sections: "All Critics Are Mortal," "During the War," and "After the War." Alfred Kazin has lived what the French critic Claude-E. Magny characterized as "the age of the American novel" and has known many of the outstanding writers, European as well as American, of the period. His lectures, completely free of academic pretentiousness or dogmatism, constantly affirm that literature itself must not be overshadowed by critical theory, that literature must remain in constant relation with life. His texts constitute a harmonious blending of personal experience with writers and their works, snatches of autobiography, and historical and critical comments, an entertaining conversation with a critic...