Alfred Kazin Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Alfred Kazin was born in 1915 in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. The sights and sounds of pushcarts, tenement stairways, and the street-corner life of working-class Brooklyn left an enduring imprint on his imagination. Public schools and the city itself became his first great teachers. He read omnivorously at the local library and later attended City College of New York, then a wellspring of ambitious, first-generation intellectuals. At CCNY he found models of seriousness and access to the larger world of literature and ideas, discovering in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman a democratic, visionary tradition that would inform his criticism for decades.

Emergence as a Critic
In his twenties, Kazin made his name with On Native Grounds (1942), a sweeping study of American literature from the 1890s to the modern era. Written with uncommon urgency, it placed writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald within the social energies of the United States. He admired the historical reach of Van Wyck Brooks and the rigorous standards of Edmund Wilson, and he sought a criticism that could be both intimate and public-minded. The book established him as a major American critic, and he quickly became a presence in magazines and journals, writing for The New Republic, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Harper's, and The Atlantic.

The New York Intellectuals
Kazin moved among the New York intellectuals who argued about literature, politics, and culture with a passion that defined midcentury debate. He engaged, sometimes contentiously, with Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe on the moral responsibilities of criticism. At Partisan Review he crossed paths with editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips, whose magazine was a central stage for the era's fiercest arguments. He knew and wrote about Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt, whose cosmopolitan perspectives sharpened the city's critical climate. With Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz he shared the complicated fate of urban Jewish writers; Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, in different ways, became touchstones for thinking about postwar American identity.

Memoir and the City
Although celebrated as a critic, Kazin wrote some of the most evocative memoirs in American letters. A Walker in the City (1951) transforms Brownsville into a landscape of memory and initiation; it is less a personal chronicle than a meditation on the immigrant imagination seeking entrance into the American century. Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) traces the formation of a writer amid Depression-era hopes and ideological storms, while New York Jew (1978) returns to the city as both sanctuary and argument, a place where reading and ambition were forms of citizenship. Across these books, Kazin combined lyrical description with a searching moral intelligence, drawing on his encounters with fellow critics and writers to map the city of intellect.

Critical Range and Themes
Kazin's essays range widely: from Hawthorne and Melville to modern poets and novelists; from Emersonian self-reliance to the social claims pressed upon the American writer. He was alert to the tension between aesthetic autonomy and public responsibility, arguing that literature at its best renews a sense of moral experience. In An American Procession (1984) he revisited the major writers who shaped the national canon, and in God and the American Writer (1997) he explored the spiritual undercurrents of a famously secular literature. His critical voice blended affection and skepticism, keen to the pressures of history but protective of the solitary act of reading.

Teaching and Public Life
Kazin balanced the life of a working critic with university appointments. He taught at Hunter College and the City University of New York, and he held visiting positions that brought him into contact with students and scholars at other leading institutions, including Columbia and Harvard. In the classroom, he was remembered for the cadences of his reading voice and his insistence that books be treated as living arguments. His public lectures and reviews made him a familiar name to general readers, and he sustained a decades-long conversation with American culture through newspapers and magazines.

Personal Connections
Kazin's life intertwined with that of other writers not only on the page but in friendship and debate. He conversed with Edmund Wilson as a model of independence; he sparred and collaborated in print with Irving Howe; he watched the exhilarating and ruinous gifts of Delmore Schwartz; he followed the careers of Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer as barometers of postwar ambition; he valued the analytic severity of Hannah Arendt and the critical poise of Lionel Trilling; he admired Ralph Ellison's bearing of American contradiction. His marriage to the novelist Ann Birstein linked him to another current of New York letters, and his home life, while guarded, fed the reflective currents of his memoirs.

Later Years and Legacy
Kazin continued to publish into his eighties, refining a lifetime's argument that American literature is an ongoing act of self-discovery. He died in 1998, leaving behind a body of work that remains central to understanding the 20th-century canon and its critics. His journals and essays model a criticism that is historically informed yet personal, skeptical yet generous. Above all, he left a portrait of the American reader as citizen: someone who turns to books not to escape the world but to confront and enlarge it.

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