Kazin alfred biography of christopher

But even before that beginning Kazin was well on the way to becoming one of the century's eminent critics. I believe Cook understands Kazin's criticism well and how his hitching history and literature together was one of his major contributions to American letters. Cook's analysis of Kazin's analysis is magnificent reading. One complaint, a small one, is that Cook uses the quote too much.

Reading a biography, especially of a person whose work I've read, I prefer the biographer to interpret in words that stand off to the side and offer appraisal rather than using the subject's words. Cook doesn't use the extended quote so much as the isolated phrase or word which he would borrow to make a point. For me this tends to break up the flow of the thought being projected because my reading has to make the conscious distinction between biographer and subject.

But I also think that Cook's biography is an essential rider to the splendid autobiographical material Kazin himself gave us. Useful for fleshing out one's understanding of that group, their beliefs, and the period in which they lived. Howard Cincotta. Author 5 books 23 followers. I never quite knew exactly what "lucid" writing meant, but this biography of the great 20th century critic and writer is a fine example.

This unforced and even breezy fluency is all the more remarkable because of the social yearning for archaic England, legendary England, that bursts out in A Man Could Stand Up. Michel and Chartres. Offhand I can think of no other fully accomplished modernist work in which a wholly symbolic and visionary figure like George Herbert enters—and leaves—so casually.

The thoughts from it fly round and round, seem about to settle and circle even further than before and more and more swiftly. I hope thus to attain a precision of effect as startling as any Frenchman. For once, he captured neatly, almost curtly, on an impressive scale, his besetting dream of himself as a man misunderstood by everyone but finally, as in great romance, justified.

In The Last Post we see that Christopher will accept the house at Groby and all its perquisites because Valentine, pregnant with his child, cries out, How will we live? Christopher will not go back on anything that demands self-sacrifice; he cannot sacrifice a woman and their child. It is all documentation and has no perspective but individual psychology, our favorite tautology.

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest. Alfred Kazin — was a writer and teacher. Ford went off with Violet Hunt, but his wife Elsie would never divorce him. Ford, whose father was the German-born music critic of the Times , was of course a British subject but at one time established residence among his Catholic relatives in Germany and absurdly claimed German citizenship in order to divorce his wife from abroad.

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Kazin alfred biography of christopher

Sign in. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. American writer — Early life [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Personal life [ edit ]. Death [ edit ]. Bibliography [ edit ]. In light of these omissions, the vast amount of factual detail about metaphysical thought that Albanese provides is excessive; it has the effect of making her account of the history of metaphysical thought one-sided.

The partiality of the book is ironic because the writing is so precise, erudite, objective, and even-handed. The sheer volume of accurate information about the details of particular systems of metaphysical thought is enormous. In presenting so much information about what adherents of metaphysical religion claimed to be doing and so little analysis of how they functioned in the larger contexts of American social history, Albanese circumvents head-on criticism of metaphysical thinking and imbues it with more veracity, goodness, and cohesion than it may deserve.

Amanda Porterfield is the Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion at Florida State University and the author of several books in American religious history. Alfred Kazin: A Biography. By Richard M. New Haven: Yale University Press, Louis English professor Richard M. Cook authoritatively recounts the personal and professional life of a distinguished critic whose passionate critiques of American literature appeared in leading intellectual publications for more than six decades.

Born in , Kazin attained national attention and wunderkind status at age twenty-seven with his precocious masterpiece On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature With the appearance, a decade later, of A Walker in the City , he reinvented himself as a melancholic memoirist of the New York Jewish experience. Kazin was also a literary radical.

Forged in Depression-era Brooklyn, his intellectual and emotional origins were nourished by socialism. In his last decade, Kazin, who died in , delivered devastating satirical sallies against neo-conservatives.