Alfred Kazin Książki

A classic interpretation of literature from America's golden age-including the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. New Preface by the Author; Index.

“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 Yorker Over 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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the best-loved figures in nineteenth-century American literature. Though he earned his central place in our culture as an essayist and philosopher, since his death his reputation as a poet has grown as well.Known for challenging traditional thought and for his faith in the individual, Emerson was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalist movement. His poems speak to his most passionately held belief: that external authority should be disregarded in favor of one’s own experience. From the embattled farmers who “fired the shot heard round the world” in the stirring “Concord Hymn,” to the flower in “The Rhodora,” whose existence demonstrates “that if eyes were made for seeing, / Then Beauty is its own excuse for being,” Emerson celebrates the existence of the sublime in the human and in nature. Combining intensity of feeling with his famous idealism, Emerson’s poems reveal a moving, more intimate side of the man revered as the Sage of Concord.

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

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, is an influential anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852. It significantly contributed to the groundwork for the Civil War, as noted by Will Kaufman. Stowe, an abolitionist and teacher, centers the narrative around Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave, while exploring the lives of other characters. The novel portrays the harsh realities of slavery and emphasizes that Christian love can triumph over such inhumanity. As the best-selling novel of the 19th century, it sold 300,000 copies in the U.S. and one million in Great Britain within its first year, becoming a catalyst for the abolitionist movement. By 1855, it was hailed as "the most popular novel of our day." Its impact is underscored by the anecdote of Abraham Lincoln meeting Stowe and reportedly saying, "So this is the little lady who started this great war." Although this quote is apocryphal and surfaced in print only in 1896, it reflects the belief in literature's power to instigate social change, a notion that resonates with contemporary intellectuals. The enduring legacy of the novel continues to be a testament to its significance in American history and literature.

When Henry Roth published his debut novel Call It Sleep in 1934, it was greeted with considerable critical acclaim though, in those troubled times, lackluster sales. Only with its paperback publication thirty years later did this novel receive the recognition it deserves --and still enjoys. Having sold-to-date millions of copies worldwide," Call It Sleep" is the magnificent story of David Schearl, the " dangerously imaginative" child coming of age in the slums of New York.

A young man's adolescent dream of war is shattered when he takes part in the battle of Chancellorsville.

This is America in the boom years of the 1920s: hog-wild material prosperity rules the land and cripples the national life. "Dos Passos' subject is indeed democracy, but his belief-- especially as he goes into the final volume of his trilogy--is that the force of circumstances that is 20th century life is too strong for the average man, who will probably never rise above mass culture, mass superstition, or mass slogans." --Alfred Kazin, from the introduction

Theodore Dreiser's first and perhaps most accessible novel, Sister Carrie is an epic of urban life - the story of an innocent heroine adrift in an indifferent city. When small-town girl Carrie Meeber sets out for Chicago, she is equipped with nothing but a few dollars, a certain unspoiled beauty and charm, and a pitiful lack of preparation for the complex moral choices she will face.

Un niño, hijo de modestos trabajadores emigrantes ruso-judíos, camina por su barrio antes de cruzar el puente de Brooklyn hacia la Nueva York de los años veinte. Este viaje se convierte en un pasaje hacia el conocimiento durante su infancia y adolescencia, un tiempo propicio para los grandes descubrimientos. Kazin, crítico literario y historiador de la cultura, observa la pérdida de una voz narrativa propia del patrimonio literario judío, que, como señala su amigo Yaron Ezrahi, cultiva la soledad y la autobiografía. Retomando esta tradición, Kazin nos presenta su barrio, Brownsville, y el camino que tuvo que recorrer en solitario hacia el conocimiento: libros, lengua, literatura, música, metafísica, política, la ciudad y el mundo. Carson McCullers reconoció la obra como una maestra. Kazin, nacido en Brooklyn en 1915, estudió en el City College de Nueva York y en la Universidad de Columbia. Su carrera abarcó clases en Harvard y Berkeley, así como numerosos artículos y libros de crítica literaria y autobiográficos. Asociado a los New York Intellectuals, mantuvo una larga amistad con Hannah Arendt. Tras cinco años de investigación, escribió "On Native Grounds", el primer estudio serio de la literatura americana de 1890 a 1940. Recibió el premio Truman Capote en 1996 por su labor crítica.