Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America.

Like many other of the "The New York Intellectuals," Alfred Kazin was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York. He was Jewish. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. Nevertheless, he was deeply impacted by his peers' disillusion with liberalism. Adam Kirsch writes in The New Republic, "Having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity."

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. He was a friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for literary criticism. His son is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.

Bibliography

• On Native Grounds (1942)
• A Walker in the City (1951) Autobiographical "New Yorker trilogy", vol. 1
• Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) ditto, Vol. 2
• Bright Book of Life (1973)
• The Portable Blake (1976)
• New York Jew (1978) Trilogy, Vol. 3
• An American Procession (1984)
• A Writer's America (1988)
• Writing Was Everything (1995)
• A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996)
• God and the American Writer (1997)
• Alfred Kazin's Journals, edited by Richard M. Cook (Yale University Press; 2011) 598 pages; his unpublished writings

External links

• Kazin obituary by Richard Rodriguez at PBS website