God and the American Writer - Softcover

Kazin, Alfred

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679733418 ISBN 13: 9780679733416

Publisher: Vintage, 1998

Synopsis

God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner than any study I have read in the past fifty-five years--that is, since the same author's On Native Grounds.
--Louis S. Auchincloss

This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature.  Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War--so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America.  An enthralling book by a major writer.

"This is a book about the place of God in the imaginative life of a country that for two centuries countenanced slavery and then engaged in a fratricidal war to end it. For Americans no subject is more compelling or, in its entanglement with the deepest roots of the national soul, more terrible. And no one has ever written as incisively, as movingly, or as unforgivingly about it as Alfred Kazin has here."
--Louis Menand
"In the era of willful obfuscation, Alfred Kazin is the good, clear word, a brilliant scholar and an original reader. His latest book, God and the American Writer, which comes fifty-five years after On Native Grounds, proves he has lost nothing and gives us everything he has."
--David Remnick

"American writers have been born into all sorts of religious sects, but have had to struggle in solitude to make sense of God. Alfred Kazin, a cosmos unto himself, has written brilliantly and affectingly of how a dozen or so of our finest authors--poets, novelists, philosophers, and one president--endured and illuminated that struggle. Kazin is sometimes passionate, even fierce, especially in his discussions of slavery and of his hero (and mine), Abraham Lincoln. But, as ever, Kazin's writing is tempered by an enormous American empathy and by his sense of irony about our country and its spiritual predicaments. Spare, sharp, and immensely learned, God and the American Writer is the most moving volume of criticism yet by our greatest living critic."
--Sean Wilentz

About this title

Review:

Arthur Miller, who has wrestled an angel or two of his own, had this to say about Kazin's literary/theological project, God and the American Writer: "The American writer's struggles to reject, accept, sublimate, or ignore God is the stem around which Kazin has wound his fascinating insights into the works of our masters. It is a profound pleasure to read such inspired good sense." This praise is especially merited by his writing about the poets Emily Dickinson (Kazin writes about the "power and depth of her solitude"), and Walt Whitman (whose rowdy, sexual, corporeal, and pantheistic poetry, Kazin says, sought to "rescue religion by replacing it"). Whitman and Dickinson are, in many ways, the yin and yang of American approaches to spirituality. To create literature is to engage reality, to try to wrest some truth from the particulars of a life. This is an almost inevitably religious undertaking, and Kazin shows how that struggle informs the work of America's greatest writers, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot.

About the Author:

Alfred Kazin was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book of criticism, On Native Grounds (1942), was a groundbreaking study of American literature that changed radically our way of looking at it, and established him overnight as a major figure. In a series of books of his own since then, and in many critically edited texts of classic American literary works, he has established himself as our preeminent man of letters. He has taught widely at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and elsewhere. In 1996 he received from the Truman Capote Literary Trust its first Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism (in memory of Newton Arvin). He lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0679733418
• ISBN 13: 9780679733416
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288