Alfred Kazin | |
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![]() Kazin in 1973 | |
Born | Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York City | May 5, 1915
Died | May 5, 1998 Upper West Side, Manhattan, New York City | (aged 83)
Nationality | American |
Occupations |
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Spouse(s) | Natasha Dohn (divorced) Caroline Bookman (divorced) Ann Birstein (1952-1982) Judith Dunford (1983-1998) |
Children | 2 |
Parents |
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Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. His literary reviews appeared in The New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, The New Republic and The New Yorker.[1] He wrote often about the immigrant experience in early twentieth-century America.[2] His trilogy of memoirs, A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978), were all finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.[3][4][5]
He was a distinguished professor of English at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York (1963-1973) and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1973-1978, 1979-1985).[6][7]
Early life
[edit]He was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. His father, Charles Kazin, was a house-painter from Minsk.[6] His mother, Gita Fagelman, was a dressmaker from Russian Poland.[8][9][6] His father was a socialist and acolyte of Eugene V. Debs, while his mother was Orthodox.[10][11] His sister, Pearl Kazin Bell (1922–2011) was also a writer and critic. She was an assistant literary editor at Harper's Bazaar as well as a regular fiction critic for The New Leader, Partisan Review and Commentary.[12][8][1]
He graduated from Franklin K. Lane High School and the City College of New York.[2] However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York Intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. He rejected Stalin early on.[1] In 1934, he got an early break reviewing books for The New Republic.[13] The opportunity came about after he visited The New York Times office that summer to express his disagreement with a book review published by the newspaper that was written by John Chamberlain.[13] Chamberlain met with Kazin and was impressed by his arguments and recommended him to editors at The New Republic.[13] He also graduated with an MA from Columbia University in 1938.[14][15]
Career
[edit]Kazin was deeply affected by his peers' subsequent disillusion with socialism and liberalism.[16] Adam Kirsch writes in The New Republic that "having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity".[16]
In 1942, at the age of 27, he published his first book, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. Orville Prescott of The New York Times wrote: "With "On Native Grounds" he takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism."[17]
In 1951, he wrote the acclaimed memoir, A Walker in the City, where he details his childhood in the Jewish milieu of Brownsville in Brooklyn. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1952.[3] The subsequent sequels, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978) were also finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.[4][5]
He wrote out of a great passion—or great disgust—for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of history, both literary history and politics and culture. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, which carries a cash award of $100,000.[18] As of 2014, the only other person to have won the award was George Steiner.[19]
In 1963 he became a distinguished professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.[20] He stayed at Stony Brook for ten years before taking up distinguished professor positions at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1973–1978, 1979–1985).[6][20]
Personal life
[edit]Kazin was friends with Hannah Arendt.[21]
Kazin's son from his second marriage is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.[22] Alfred Kazin married his third wife, the writer Ann Birstein, in 1952, and they divorced in 1982; their daughter is Cathrael Kazin.[22] Prior to his death, Cathrael had made Aliyah to Israel.[8] She is an attorney and education specialist[23]
Kazin married a fourth time, and is survived by his widow, the writer Judith Dunford.[2]
Death
[edit]Kazin died at his home on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, New York, on his 83rd birthday in 1998.[2] At his request, he had a small funeral ceremony. He was cremated and did not have a Jewish service. However, his son, Michael, said Kaddish.[8] A year later, Michael and his step-mother, Judith scattered his ashes in the East River.[24]
Bibliography
[edit]Author
[edit]- On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942)
- The Open Street (1948)
- A Walker in the City (1951)
- The Inmost Leaf: Essays on American and European Writers (1955)
- Contemporaries: Essays on Modern Life and Literature (1963)
- Starting Out in the Thirties (1965)
- Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (1973)
- New York Jew (1978)
- The State of the Book World, 1980: Three Talks (1980), with Dan Lacy and Ernest L. Boyer
- An American Procession: The Major American Writers from 1830 to 1930—The Crucial Century (1984)
- A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature (1988)
- Our New York (1989), co-authored with David Finn
- The Emmy Parrish Lectures in American Studies (1991)
- Writing Was Everything (1995)
- A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996)
- God and the American Writer (1997)
- Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings (2003), edited and with an introduction by Ted Solotaroff
- Alfred Kazin's Journals (2011), selected and edited by Richard M. Cook
Editor (selected)
[edit]- The Portable Blake The Viking Press, 1946, reprinted many times between 1959 and 1975; Penguin Books 1976, reprinted 1977, ISBN 0140150269
- F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work
- The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, co-edited with Charles Shapiro
- Emerson: A Modern Anthology, co-edited with Daniel Aaron
- The Works of Anne Frank, co-edited with Ann Birstein
- The Open Form: Essays for Our Time
- Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne
References
[edit]- ^ a b c Brownsville Boy The Forward. 20 February 2008
- ^ a b c d Wilborn Hampton (6 June 1998). "Alfred Kazin, the Author Who Wrote of Literature and Himself, Is Dead at 83". The New York Times. p. B 9. Retrieved 17 November 2020.
- ^ a b A Walker in the City National Book Foundation. Retrieved on 1 February 2024
- ^ a b Starting Out in the Thirties National Book Foundation. Retrieved on 5 February 2024
- ^ a b New York Jew National Book Foundation. Retrieved on 5 February 2024
- ^ a b c d Obituary: Alfred Kazin The Independent. 28 June 1998
- ^ Talking with Alfred Kazin The Washington Post. 6 May 1984
- ^ a b c d Alfred Kazin’s Last Steps Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 16 June 1998
- ^ Garner, Dwight (26 May 2011). "A Lifetime of Anxiety and Lust". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ In the Capital of Words The New Yorker. 14 June 1998
- ^ Outsider Artist Bookforum. February/March 2008
- ^ Paid Notice: Deaths BELL, PEARL KAZIN The New York Times. 15 June 2011
- ^ a b c That Mean, Fermenting Decade The New York Times. 24 October 1965
- ^ Remarkable Columbians Columbia University. Retrieved on 5 February 2024
- ^ ALFRED KAZIN DIES AT 83 The Washington Post. 6 June 1998
- ^ a b Kirsch, Adam (26 October 2011). "The Inner Clamor". The New Republic (review of Alfred Kazin's Journals). Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ Books of the Times The New York Times. 30 October 1942
- ^ "First Capote Award Goes to Alfred Kazin". The New York Times. 10 January 1996. Retrieved 17 August 2012.
- ^ "Alfred Kazin Papers – Overview". New York Public Library. Retrieved 15 February 2020.
- ^ a b Alfred Kain's Journals JSTOR. 2011
- ^ Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth (2004), Hannah Arendt. For Love of the World, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, pp. 263, 360
- ^ a b Roberts, Sam (May 29, 2017). "Ann Birstein, Memoirist and Novelist, Dies at 89". The New York Times. Retrieved 12 February 2020.
- ^ Materials Indiana Commission for Higher Education. 13 February 2014
- ^ MY CITY; Crossing to the Great Beyond via the Brooklyn Bridge The New York Times. 23 July 1999
External links
[edit]- Alfred Kazin, champion of American literature: An appreciation by Fred Mazelis on the World Socialist Web Site
- "Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Alfred Kazin", with an Introduction & Commentary by Helgard Mahrdt, Samtiden 1 - 2005, Retrieved 2 September 2014
- Alfred Kazin Papers at the New York Public Library