Alfred Kazin

Kazin’s memorable description of his life as a young man as he makes the journey from Brooklyn to “americanca”-the larger world that begins at the other end of the subway in Manhattan. A classic portrayal of the Jewish immigrant culture of the 1930s. Drawings by Marvin Bileck.

A Walker in the City

A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. It stands as clear 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."

Writing Was Everything

William Blake

A collection of the poetry, prose, and art of the English mystic, accompanied by a biographical sketch

Selected and Arranged with an Introduction by Alfred Kazin

The Portable Blake

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life. To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more. Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

Alfred Kazin's Journals

The distinguished literary critic picks up the story of his life in 1940 and chronicles the significant events, people, and places of his life thereafter and comments on the literary doings of the forties, fifties, and sixties

New York Jew

Herman Melville

The classic story of Moby Dick, the whale pursued relentlessly by the crazed Captain Ahab.

Moby Dick

An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

On Native Grounds

Portable William Blake

The Portable Blake, Selected and Arranged, with an Introd., by Alfred Kazin

A literary icon’s “singular and beautiful” memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New Yorker). A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new. With vivid imagery and sensual detail—the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses—Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to “the city,” the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer. “The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.” —The New York Times

“With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism” (The New York Times). An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive—yet accessible—analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America’s golden age—from 1890 to 1940—included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin’s interpretation. Kazin’s debut was impressive in its scope for such a young author and became a part of his renowned trilogy of literary criticism, which also includes An American Procession and God the American Writer. “Not only a literary but a moral history . . . The best and most complete treatment we have.” —Lionel Trilling, The Nation

An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature

Stephen Crane

The brutal effects of poverty and the loneliness of slum life are portrayed in a selection of the author's works, which heralded the appearance of naturalism in American literature.

Maggie, a Girl of the Streets and Selected Stories

"A stunning book. . . . Perhaps the most evocative reminiscence of a vital corner of the nineteen-thirties that we are likely to get. A beautifully written memoir in which the author's location of himself as a man, an intellectual, and a moral being is interwoven with the chronicle of an era. It is a wonderful book."--Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times "Men lived in the thirties, Kazin is saying, with peculiar stresses, particular faces and one or another kind of relationship to the age which bred them and asked them to respond to it. His book is as admirable a record of how they did that as any we have been given."--Richard Gilman, Dissent

Starting Out in the Thirties

The Complete Stories

Flannery O'Connor

The distinguished literary critic and historian identifies and examines the influences of American landscapes, pastoral and urban, on American writers ranging from Jefferson to Bellow

Landscape in Literature

A Writer's America

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Presents a selection of fifteen short fiction stories by nineteenth-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Frank McCourt

Toni Morrison

Russell Baker

Eileen Simpson

Annie Dillard

Henry Louis Gates

Ian Frazier

Jill Ker Conway

The author of On Writing Well presents stories and advice on the writing process from Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, and many more. For anyone who enjoys reading memoirs—or is thinking about writing one—this collection offers a master class from nine distinguished authors: Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson. “Annie Dillard talks of her Pittsburgh childhood and her moment of waking to the world outside. Russell Baker explains why his first draft of Growing Up was so bad that he had to start over again. Alfred Kazin finds that writing about his Brooklyn childhood connected him with the great tradition of Emerson and Whitman. Toni Morrison tells why her fiction uses not only family history but the slave narratives of her people. Lewis Thomas traces the evolution of his singular self from primeval bacteria to contemporary scientist whose drive to be useful is the most fundamental of all biological necessities. . . . Delightful and instructive.” —Library Journal

Alfred Kazin

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