Alfred Kazin's Journals - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 030014203X ISBN 13: 9780300142037

Publisher: Yale University Press, 2011

Synopsis

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.

To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.

Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

About this title

About the Author

Richard M. Cook is chair of the English department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Reviews

Starred Review. This generous selection from Alfred Kazin's (1915–1998) voluminous journals (7,000 pages in all), covering some 65 years, showcases two aspects of this cranky intellectual's mind and critical art. First, there is the unqualified gift for literary portraits. Second, there is a consciousness of Jewishness, class, and culture that has all but disappeared from intellectual discourse since the 1980s. (Kazin's attacks on the neocons are from the gut.) The publication of these journals, ably edited and annotated by Kazin's biographer, display all his passions. When Kazin liked an author, there was no stopping him, whether Dylan Thomas ("How much light goes out of this world with the passing of our wizard, our beautiful careless singer?") or his Smith student Plath ("the girl whose talent was so fully formed that when I met her, it was already outside her"). And when Kazin hates, he also goes equally all out, whether against Cynthia Ozick or Mark Van Doren ("inspires me with contempt and disgust"). Kazin wanted to publish his blunt, self-revelatory and often self-corrosive musings before he died, but the world had to wait. "What happened to the good old term, ÿman-of-letters?' " he asks rhetorically. These journals give us an intimate look at one of the great ones. (June)

Edition details

• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 030014203X
• ISBN 13: 9780300142037
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 632
• Editor: Cook Richard M.