Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin (born June 5, 1915, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died June 5, 1998, New York, New York) was an American critic and author noted for his studies of American literature and his autobiographical writings.

The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Kazin attended the City College of New York during the Great Depression and then worked as a freelance book reviewer for The New Republic and other periodicals. At age 27 he wrote a sweeping historical study of modern American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), that won him instant recognition as a perceptive critic with a distinct point of view. The book traces the social and political movements that inspired successive stages of literary development in America from the time of William Dean Howells to that of William Faulkner.

Kazin’s critical viewpoint and liberal political sensibilities were inextricably intertwined. He eschewed close textual or formal analysis, preferring instead to comprehend writers and their works in relation to the larger society and times in which they lived. In a sequel to his first book, Bright Book of Life (1973), he surveyed American literature from the writings of Ernest Hemingway to those of Norman Mailer. Among Kazin’s other studies of American literature are the essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955) and Contemporaries (1962); another broad survey of American prose, An American Procession (1984); and God and the American Writer (1997). He also published book-length studies of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Theodore Dreiser, edited anthologies of the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and was a visiting professor at various universities.

Kazin’s sketches of literary personalities reveal much about both writers and their eras. He himself wrote three autobiographical works: A Walker in the City (1951), which lyrically evokes his youth in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn; Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), memoirs of his young manhood; and New York Jew (1978), about his life during the years from World War II to the 1970s. He also drew upon and reworked material from his extensive journals in A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (1996). Alfred Kazin’s Journals (2011), edited by Richard M. Cook, provides a wide range of selections from the 1930s through the 1990s.