A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin - Hardcover

Kazin, Alfred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006019037X ISBN 13: 9780060190378

Publisher: Harpercollins, 1996

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

In On Native Grounds, the classic work of literary criticism published in 1942, Alfred Kazin helped to define American literature and its relationship to the time and place from which it emerged. The intervening decades have not always been kind to the tradition of literary criticism that he helped create or the literature he helped define. "Where," he writes, "is the writer to be found who will have the inner certainty to see our life with the eyes of faith, and so make the world shine again?" This collection of journal entries follows Kazin's journey into dismay, if not despair, as well as his inward search for something that might provide a foundation for hope.

About the Author:

Alfred Kazin has taught at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harpercollins
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 006019037X
• ISBN 13: 9780060190378
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 341