Bøger af Alfred Kazin

Step into the world of 20th century literature and culture through the eyes of one of America's most acclaimed critics. Featuring essays on writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and William Faulkner, as well as insights into popular culture, politics, and the arts, Contemporaries is a fascinating and wide-ranging collection.This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it.This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

From the journals of one of our most distinguished critics comes an extraordinary panorama of the intellectual, social and political culture of the last half century. Written with the vividness and power of first-rate fiction, it brings to life the great artists and thinkers who shaped the times, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Hannah Arendt, and shares Kazin's insights on politics, literature, Jewish life after the Holocaust and American society. It is an immensely rich and resonant memoir from an observer whose eloquence can imbue each moment lived with a lifetime of thought and passion.

"Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend. . . . Ted Solotaroff's selection of his work is a fitting tribute, a book that will be a starting point for further reading, both of Kazin and of the native writers to whom he devoted himself" -- The New YorkerOver the course of 60 years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates and including such unexpected figures as Abraham Lincoln, William James and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that he succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters. At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist.Editor Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany these critical writings. The excerpts include 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. Alfred Kazin's America provides an ongoing example of the spiritual freedom, individualism, and democratic contentiousness that he regarded as his heritage and endeavored to pass on.

On its debut, this brilliant, innovative, and influential study established Alfred Kazin's reputation as a leading literary critic. Now, in its fiftieth year of publication, Kazin's work is as relevant as on the day it was first written, a classic that brings fresh perspective to our interpretation of the literature belonging to what many consider the golden era of American letters. Kazin discusses the work of Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner, among others writing in the period embraced by the Civil War and World War II, and declares this era the advent of a truly American literary style: sensitive to economic and social issues while expressing an intense national consciousness. Importantly, Kazin believes that this emerging American literature reflected not simply a reaction to Victorian gentility and repression but something greater -- the moral transformation of our entire society under the gathering impact of industrialization, science, and world wars. It was this idea of a nation's principal literary figures being bound so directly to its social development that made Kazin's analysis revolutionary and that maintains its vitality fifty years later.

Blending autobiography, history, and criticism, this book is a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma and stands as testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind."

Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of intellectual life for three decades in the middle of the 20th century, tells his own story and with it a history of contemporary American letters.