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The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alfred Kazin was born in Brooklyn. His memories of his parents and childhood, movingly evoked in these journals, serve to bracket a life spent in a different world altogether. The young Kazin fell madly in love with America, and with literature, music, politics, social and moral debate, New York, and the artists and thinkers who contributed to culture in his lifetime--as these journals attest. He may be the last in the great tradition of twentieth-century literary and social critics in this country, which began with Edmund Wilson.While leading an active life, Kazin has faithfully kept diaries from the late 1930s up to the present. A LIFETIME BURNING IN EVERY MOMENT offers readers the best of thousands of pages of his journals, comprising an extraordinary picture of intellectual, social, political, and even celebrity life--including such figures as Bernard Berenson, Josephine Herbst, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Hannah Arendt--during the past five and a half decades. Kazin candidly reflects on his four marriages, his feelings about the Holocaust, his criticism of American society, the pleasure and stimulation of reading good writers (Simone Weil, Ignazio Silone, Joseph Conrad, and Saul Bellow, among others), his need to pray, his travels abroad and within the United States, and more.Written with the vividness and power of good fiction, A LIFETIME BURNING IN EVERY MOMENT is the author's own selection and commentary on his life, times, and contemporaries. Alfred Kazin is a sensitive and ever alert observer who has never been at a loss for the most striking words. His prose in these journals is as passionate, lyrical, and apostrophic as that found in his previous books, among them the classics ON NATIVE GROUNDS AND A WALKER IN THE CITY.

"...[T]o judge from 'A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment'...Mr. Kazin may never have found the native ground he expected, nor has he found a satisfactory continuation of the triumphant arc he once started to trace."

Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 06/23/1996

"'A Lifetime Burning' is scarcely intended as a comprehensive account of the meaning of engagement in literature. What it does evoke, quite poignantly, is how writing and reading and writing about reading can serve the most serious spiritual ends for the post-traditional Jew, who is a kind of hidden stranger among his New York intellectual peers."

Robert Alter, New Republic

A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin: Search Results