Alfred Kazin

He was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York City. 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]

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 embedded in his published opinions knowledge of literary history, 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]

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]

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]

Author

• 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)

• 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