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Alfred Kazin by Richard M. Cook
- Abstract
In the late 1930’s and early 40’s, a young literary critic and recent graduate of the City College of New York spent four years composing a 500-page survey of American writers from 1880 to 1940. Working in the magnificent reading room of the New York Public Library, Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) traced the course of what he saw as a realist and progressive tradition in American letters. He did so, moreover, as one personally imbued with the socialist hopefulness that he had absorbed from the immigrant Jewish milieu in which he grew up and that now seemed widespread and flourishing.
The book, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942), was wildly successful, and launched its young author on a spectacular literary career. Although much of it might seem dated and overly precious to a reader today, On Native Grounds showed an amazingly confident and precocious grasp of its subject, and was rightly heralded as a landmark effort at claiming high status for modern American writing among the world’s great literatures. It also helped pave the way for the academic interest in American studies that would burgeon after the war and in which Kazin himself would play a part as an influential teacher, public lecturer, and the author of innumerable essays and reviews.
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