Writing Was Everything

Informationen zum Autor Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) was Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and author and editor of many books, including A Writer’s America: Landscape in American Literature . Klappentext A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism that moves from New York in the 1930s to wartime England to the postwar South, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. 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. Whether reflecting on modernism, southern fiction, or black, Jewish, and New Yorker writing, or sharing anecdotes about Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he gives a penetrating, moving account of literature observed and lived. In his life as a critic, Kazin personifies the lesson that living and writing are necessarily intimate. Zusammenfassung Blending autobiography, history, and criticism, this book is a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma and stands as testimony to Kazin’s belief that “literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind.”

Product details

• Authors: Alfred Kazin, Kazin Alfred
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Content: Book
• Product form: Paperback / Softback
• Publication date: 01.04.1999
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries
• EAN: 9780674962385
• ISBN: 978-0-674-96238-5
• Pages: 160
• Series: The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization; The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies; William E. Massey Sr. Lectures > 8; The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization
• Subjects: Cultural Studies, Biography: general, English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 20th Century, Literary studies: from c 1900 -, Literary theory, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Biography: philosophy and social sciences