Writing Was Everything
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.52 (705 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674962370 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 160 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-05-18 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
C. Ebeling said Simply Brilliant. The world lost a truly remarkable man of letters when Alfred Kazin died in 1998. Fortunately he left behind a trail of criticism, essays and memoir that allow us to enjoy him ad infinitum. WRITING WAS EVERYTHING is the text of lectures he delivered at Harvard in 199Simply Brilliant C. Ebeling The world lost a truly remarkable man of letters when Alfred Kazin died in 1998. Fortunately he left behind a trail of criticism, essays and memoir that allow us to enjoy him ad infinitum. WRITING WAS EVERYTHING is the text of lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1994, an amalgam of criticism, history and personal anecdote that celebrates the massive en. , an amalgam of criticism, history and personal anecdote that celebrates the massive en. A Treasure; The Best Intro to Kazin Chris Sagers--Author I can only add my voice to the words of the previous reviewer; I think this wonderful book endears itself immediately to most readers simply by being so humble. Kazin mourns the current state of literary academia, in which it seems that criticism can exist only as a political philosophy or as an elitist game of celebrity-making. Rather, Kazin aspires t. "A Reader's Critic" according to A Customer. Alfred Kazin's death last year robbed America of a rare character in the world of arts and letters: a humble critic. WRITING WAS EVERYTHING offers the reader a glimpse of that wonderful mind that spoke to the reader, not to the theorist. Kazin mourned the days when litersture "was held sacred". This delightful little book is the perfect summation of a
From Publishers Weekly Reflecting with graceful erudition on literature, litterateurs and his own work, noted critic Kazin (On Native Grounds) offers a distilled summa of his engagements with the word. Based on lectures delivered at Harvard, the book opens with a vigorous harrumph directed at postmodern critics. Indeed, Kazin learned from his childhood exposure to Dickens and from his apprenticeship as a book reviewer under Edmund Wilson at the New Republic that books matter, that they link authors-for example, Faulkner, Henry Roth and Richard Wright-to the passions of their time. Assigned in 1945 to report on the social crisis in Britain, Kazin entered a darker world, grappling with Orwell and Kafka, and also with Simone Weil, whose life and writing recalled for him the madness of Moby-Dick. . Back in New York after the war, Kazin began walking his city and engaged with Rothko and Bell
Writing Was Everything is a summation of that life, a story of coming of age as a writer and critic that is also a vibrant cultural drama teeming with such characters as Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell. In his encounters with books, Kazin shows us how great writing matters and how it involves us morally, socially, and personally on the deepest level. For more than sixty years Alfred Kazin has been one of the most eloquent witnesses to the literary life of the mind in America. In his life as a critic, Kazin personifies the lesson that living and writing are necessarily intimate. Whether reflecting on modernism, southern fiction, or black, Jewish, and New Yorker writing or reliving the work of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he gives a penetrating, moving account