Writing Was Everthing (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization) - Hardcover

Kazin, Alfred

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674962370 ISBN 13: 9780674962378

Verlag: Harvard University Press, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

For more than sixty years Alfred Kazin has been one of the most eloquent witnesses to the literary life of the mind in America. "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 Ginsburg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell. A 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 York" writing or reliving the work of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he gives a penetrating, moving account of literature observed and lived. In his life as a crtiic, Kazin personifies the lesson that living and writing are necessarily intimate. "Writing Was Everything" encapsulates the lively wit and authority of this timeless critic's unmistakable voice. It stands as clear 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".

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Críticas

"Writing Was Everything" is drawn from lectures Mr. Kazin delivered at Harvard last year and, like all his work, it is well organized, thoughtful and thought-provoking...[and] concise and brilliant, a combination that few writers think is possible. After discussing authors whose lives and works he has studied, he continues to look ahead, searching for the writer 'who will have the inner certainty to see our life with the eyes of faith, and so make the world shine again.' In that quest is found the reason literature matters.--Philip Seib "Dallas Morning News "

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harvard University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0674962370
• ISBN 13: 9780674962378
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 168
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Amazon EU Sarl; 0; www.amazon.com; ; 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; 0; L-1855; Luxemburg