Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. His literary reviews appeared in The New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, The New Republic and The New Yorker. His trilogy of memoirs, A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978), were all finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Early life

He was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York City. His father, Charles Kazin, was a house-painter from Minsk. His sister, Pearl Kazin Bell (1922–2011) was also a writer and critic. She was an assistant literary editor at Harper's Bazaar as well as a regular fiction critic for The New Leader, Partisan Review and Commentary. In 1934, he got an early break reviewing books for The New Republic. He also graduated with an MA from Columbia University in 1938.

Career

Kazin was deeply affected by his peers' subsequent disillusion with socialism and liberalism. Adam Kirsch writes in The New Republic that "having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity".

In 1951, he wrote the acclaimed memoir A Walker in the City, where he details his childhood in the Jewish milieu of Brownsville in Brooklyn. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1952. The subsequent sequels, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and

New York Jew (1978) were also finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

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. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, which carries a cash award of $100,000. As of 2014, the only other person to have won the award was George Steiner.

In 1963 he became a distinguished professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He stayed at Stony Brook for ten years before taking up distinguished professor positions at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1973–1978, 1979–1985).

Kazin's son from his second marriage is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin. Alfred Kazin married his third wife, the writer Ann Birstein, in 1952, and they divorced in 1982; their daughter is Cathrael Kazin.

Kazin married a fourth time, and is survived by his widow, the writer Judith Dunford.

Bibliography

thumb|Library Walk New York City, excerpt from New York Jew

Author

  • On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942)
  • The Open Street (1948)
  • A Walker in the City (1951)
  • The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers (1955)
  • Contemporaries: Essays on Modern Life and Literature (1963)
  • Starting Out in the Thirties (1965)
  • Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (1973)
  • New York Jew (1978)
  • The State of the Book World, 1980: Three Talks (1980), with Dan Lacy and Ernest L. Boyer
  • An American Procession: The Major American Writers from 1830 to 1930—The Crucial Century (1984)
  • A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature (1988)
  • Our New York (1989), co-authored with David Finn
  • The Emmy Parrish Lectures in American Studies (1991)
  • Writing Was Everything (1995)
  • A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)
  • God and the American Writer (1997)
  • Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings (2003), edited and with an introduction by Ted Solotaroff
  • Alfred Kazin's Journals (2011), selected and edited by Richard M. Cook

Editor (selected)

  • The Portable Blake The Viking Press, 1946, reprinted many times between 1959 and 1975; Penguin Books 1976, reprinted 1977,
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work
  • The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, co-edited with Charles Shapiro
  • Emerson: A Modern Anthology, co-edited with Daniel Aaron
  • The Works of Anne Frank, co-edited with Ann Birstein
  • The Open Form: Essays for Our Time
  • Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne

References

  • Alfred Kazin, champion of American literature: An appreciation by Fred Mazelis on the World Socialist Web Site
  • "Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Alfred Kazin", with an Introduction & Commentary by Helgard Mahrdt, Samtiden 1 - 2005, Retrieved 2 September 2014
  • Alfred Kazin Papers at the New York Public Library