A short life of the author
Alfred Kazin (5 June 1915 – 5 June 1998) was an American literary critic, essayist, and memoirist who was, for the middle decades of the twentieth century, the foremost critic of American literature. His first book, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942), written when he was twenty-seven, surveyed American writing from William Dean Howells to the present with an ambition and authority that seemed to come from nowhere — Kazin was the son of immigrant house painters from Brownsville, Brooklyn, with no institutional connections and no advanced degree. The book made him famous overnight and established the terms in which American literary criticism would be conducted for a generation. His autobiographical trilogy — A Walker in the City (1951), Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), and New York Jew (1978) — is among the finest American memoir writing of the century, a sustained meditation on the experience of the Jewish-American intellectual in the age of modernism.
Life
Kazin was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to Gitel and Charles Kazin, Jewish immigrants from Minsk who worked as house painters. Brownsville was one of the poorest and most densely Jewish neighborhoods in New York — Yiddish-speaking, politically radical, culturally hungry. Kazin grew up in a household where books were revered but money was scarce, and his early intellectual life was shaped by the public library, the City College system, and the radical political culture of Depression-era New York.
He attended City College of New York and then Columbia University, supporting himself through freelance reviewing and editing. By his mid-twenties, he was reviewing regularly for The New Republic and The New York Herald Tribune and was already working on the enormous critical study that would become On Native Grounds.
After the success of that book, Kazin taught at numerous universities — including the New School, Amherst, Smith, CUNY, and Harvard — but he was never primarily an academic. He was a man of letters in the older sense: a critic who wrote for the general reader, whose authority derived from the depth of his reading and the quality of his prose rather than from institutional position.
On Native Grounds (1942)
The book is a critical history of American prose literature from the 1890s to the 1940s — from Howells and the realists through naturalism, the muckrakers, the modernists, the proletarian novelists, and the Southern Agrarians. Kazin reads American literature as a series of attempts to come to terms with the modern American experience — industrialisation, immigration, urbanisation, war, and the dislocations of capitalism — and his critical judgments are sharp, generous, and often brilliant.
The book’s great strength is its combination of historical sweep and close critical attention. Kazin writes about Dreiser, Willa Cather, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner, and dozens of lesser figures with equal seriousness and with a prose style that is itself a literary achievement — warm, muscular, rhythmically alive.
On Native Grounds was published to immediate acclaim and has remained in print. It is still the single best introduction to American literature in the period it covers.
The Autobiographical Trilogy
A Walker in the City (1951) is Kazin’s memoir of growing up in Brownsville — a lyrical, intensely sensory evocation of immigrant Brooklyn in the 1920s and 1930s. The writing is extraordinary: Kazin recreates the sounds, smells, textures, and emotional atmosphere of his childhood with a vividness that approaches Proust. The book is not a conventional memoir — it has no continuous narrative — but a series of meditations on place, language, family, and the experience of being formed by a world that one is also leaving behind.
Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) covers Kazin’s young manhood in the 1930s — the literary world, the political left, the cafeterias and magazines and friendships that shaped a generation of New York intellectuals. It is a portrait of an intellectual community — Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow — at the moment of its formation.
New York Jew (1978) carries the story through the postwar decades — Kazin’s friendships and rivalries with the major American writers and intellectuals of the era, his marriages (he was married four times), and his evolving sense of what it meant to be a Jew in American intellectual life. The book is more bitter and more honest than its predecessors.
Critical Standing
Kazin belongs to the great generation of New York intellectuals — alongside Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, and Hannah Arendt — who made literary criticism a central activity of American intellectual life. His criticism is distinguished by its warmth, its democratic sympathies, and its refusal to reduce literature to politics or theory. He has been somewhat eclipsed in academic reputation by more theoretically oriented critics, but his books are still read, still admired, and still useful.
Note: Manhattan Transfer and The 42nd Parallel, sometimes catalogued under Kazin’s name, are novels by John Dos Passos. Kazin wrote extensively about Dos Passos but did not author those works.
Collecting Kazin
On Native Grounds (1942, Reynal & Hitchcock) in first edition with dust jacket brings $100–$300. A Walker in the City (1951, Harcourt, Brace) brings $50–$150. Starting Out in the Thirties (1965, Little, Brown) and New York Jew (1978, Knopf) bring $20–$60 each. Signed copies are uncommon and command premiums. Kazin’s journals, published posthumously as Alfred Kazin’s Journals (2011, edited by Richard M. Cook), are the most revealing and valuable recent addition to his published work.