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Alfred Kazin
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Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writingsby Alfred Kazin , Ted SolotaroffISBN 0060512768 (0-06-051276-8)
Softcover, Perennial
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings'Book summary:Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that in his books, essays, and reviews, Kazin succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters, the one who kept closest track of its proceedings, its history, its symbiotic relationship with American society, and its relations with other Western literatures. He did so out of a particularly passionate concern for the significance and well-being of our literary heritage. The America that was mostly a political and cultural position-taking for his fellow New York intellectuals was for Kazin a lifelong possession and a complex fate. His working title for his final book, God and the American Writer, which dealt mostly with nineteenth-century authors, was "Absent Friends."
At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he typically put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." To indicate the development of this charged point of view, Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. These excerpts also provide the pleasure of his sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod literary milieus and of such figures as Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Hannah Arendt.
The selections in Alfred Kazin's America follow the course of his career. They are introduced by the editor's substantial essay, which connects the youth to the man and both to the critic, and draws upon Solotaroff's own relations with him. This close joining of the personal to the critical seeks to pass on and reactivate a great American critic's presence and legacy.
As our sense of the American past continues to dry up and threatens to blow away in the heavy winds of change, those writers who can make our heritage come alive again and challenge us become all the more essential. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that takes us back to Emerson and forward through our literature to the better part of our own Americanism.
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The American Earthquakeby Alfred Kazin , Ted SolotaroffISBN 0306806967 (0-306-80696-7)
Softcover, Perseus Books Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The American Earthquake'Book summary:During a twelve-month period in 1930 and 1931, Edmund Wilson wrote a series of lengthy articles which he then collected in a book called American Jitters: A Year of the Slump. The resulting chronicle was hailed by the New York Times as "the best reporting that the period of depression has brought forth in the United States," and forms the heart of the present volume. In prose that is by turns dramatic and naturalistic, inflammatory and evocative, satirical and droll, Wilson painted an unforgettable portrait of a time when "the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces." The American Earthquake bookends this chronicle with a collection of Wilson's non-literary articlesincluding criticism, reportage, and some fictionfrom the years of "The Follies," 19231928, and the dawn of the New Deal, 19321934. During this period, Wilson had grown from a little-known journalist to one of the most important American literary and social critics of the century. The American Earthquake amply conveys the astonishing breadth of Wilson's talent, provides an unparalleled vision of one of the most troubling periods in American history, and, perhaps inadvertently, offers a self-portrait comparable to The Education of Henry Adams.[via]More editions of The American Earthquake:
An American Processionby Alfred KazinISBN 0394503783 (0-394-50378-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailerby Alfred KazinISBN 0268006644 (0-268-00664-4)
Softcover, Univ of Notre Dame Pr
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Bright Book of Life:American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailerby Alfred KazinISBN 0316484180 (0-316-48418-0)
Hardcover, Little, Brown
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Call It Sleepby Henry Roth, Alfred KazinISBN 0141188650 (0-14-118865-0)
Softcover, Penguin Books, Limited
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Call It Sleep : A Novel'Book summary:When Henry Roth published Call It Sleep, his first novel, in 1934, it was greeted with critical acclaim. But in that dark Depression year, books were hard to sell, and the novel quickly dropped out of sight, as did its twenty-eight-year-old author. Only with its paperback publication in 1964 did the novel receive the recognition it deserves. Call It Sleep was the first paperback ever to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, and it proceeded to sell millions of copies both in the United States and around the world.[via]-
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Manby Alfred KazinISBN 0020041004 (0-02-004100-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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God and the American Writerby Alfred KazinISBN 0394549686 (0-394-54968-6)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Inmost Leaf: A Selection of Essaysby Alfred KazinISBN 0156443988 (0-15-644398-8)
Softcover, Harcourt on Demand
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A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazinby Alfred KazinISBN 0060928328 (0-06-092832-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins
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McTeague : A Story of San Franciscoby Frank Norris, Alfred KazinISBN 0375761292 (0-375-76129-2)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'McTeague : A Story of San Francisco'Book summary:An unflinchingly realistic portrayal of the moral descent of a San Francisco dentist, McTeague, first published in 1899, helped to propel American literature into the twentieth century. The novel glows in a light that makes it the first great tragic portrait in America of an acquisitive society, writes Alfred Kazin in the Introduction to this Modern Library Paperback Classic. McTeagues San Francisco is the underworld of that society, and the darkness of its tragedy, its pitilessness, its grotesque humor, is like the rumbling of hell. Nothing is more remarkable in the book than the detachment with which Norris saw ita tragedy almost literally classic in the Greek sense of the debasement of a powerful manand nothing gives it so much power. [via]
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New York Jewby Alfred KazinISBN 0394495675 (0-394-49567-5)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literatureby Alfred KazinISBN 015668750X (0-15-668750-X)
Softcover, Pub Overstock Unlimited Inc
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The Open Form: Essays for Our Timeby Alfred KazinISBN 0155675338 (0-15-567533-8)
Hardcover, Harcourt, Brace & World
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Our New Yorkby David Finn, Alfred KazinISBN 0060161825 (0-06-016182-5)
Hardcover, Harper & Row
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The Portable Blakeby Alfred Kazin , William BlakeISBN 0140150269 (0-14-015026-9)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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Sister Carrieby Alfred Kazin , William BlakeISBN 0140188282 (0-14-018828-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sister Carrie'Book summary:Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.
Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]
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A Walker in the Cityby Alfred KazinISBN 0156941767 (0-15-694176-7)
Softcover, Harcourt
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Walker in the City'Book summary:In A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin recalls his childhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn with such tactile specificity that readers, too, will smell "that good and deep odor of lox, of salami, of herrings and half-sour pickles" that emanated from the neighborhood pushcarts. His story is set in the working-class Jewish community of New York City in the decade preceding the Great Depression, but this classic memoir of the first-generation American experience resonates universally. Kazin depicts his younger self as a smart, unhappy kid who dreamed of escape from a confining local landscape. He found in books the road map to a freer territory. In Kazin's case, this was "the city" ("everything just out of Brownsville") whose glamorous institutions--the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden--spoke of an American past and an intellectual community that this son of eastern European immigrants was determined to make his own. (And he did, with his pioneering 1942 critical work, On Native Grounds, published when he was just 27.) Yet Kazin came to understand that the roots he had been so anxious to tear up were the source of his deepest identity. His loving portrait of his past acknowledges the crucial importance of belonging, even as it affirms the compelling necessity of escape. What could be more American? --Wendy Smith [via]
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Writers at Work, Third Seriesby Alfred KazinISBN 0140045422 (0-14-004542-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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