Writing Was Everything

The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies

by Alfred Kazin

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 Ginsberg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell.

A deft 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 Yorker 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 critic, 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."

Genres: Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Memoir, 20th Century

152 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic, many of whose writings depicted the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America.

Kazin is regarded as one of "The New York Intellectuals", and like many other members of this group he was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York. However, his politics were more moderate than most of the New York intellectuals, many of whom were socialists. 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. He was a friend of the political theorist Hannah Arendt. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award for literary criticism.

His son is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin.

(from wikipedia.org)

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kazin is not only one of the greatest literary critics of the 20th Century, he's definitely one of my favorites...his afterwords to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were some of the best critical stuff I've read recently (and by recently I literally mean within the last couple of months)...this is mostly a memoir, with come critical commentary tossed in for good measure...not the type of dry writing you'd expect from a critic, and not terribly dense (a thin volume even in hardback, roughly 150 pages)...Not for everyone by any means, but I really loved it...probably going to re-read it in the very near future...

[Tyler Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Freedom to read how you want to is the creed of this book, which is what any critical approaches class attempts to do away with. The book is short, for sure, but certainly something every aspiring critic or creative writing student should read.

[Elliot Ratzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading “this unpunished vice.” Kazin was a top New York critic and literary scholar back when being a critic was its own artform, and there were new things to discover in European and American literature. Literary judgement still mystifies me, and remains unknown to most. These meandering lectures on writers and literary criticism, given in the early 90s, are a treasure-trove of observations, anecdotes, and sketches of some giants—some famous, some now forgotten—of fiction and poetry. I started a list of authors to read: Wilson, Pritchard (critics), Cheever, Faulkner, O’Connor, Katherine Porter, Josephine Herbst (novelists). Though it’s his wheelhouse, I remain indifferent to the poets—Blake, Milosz, Jarrell, Tate—he champions. There are nice sketches of Arendt, Kafka’s Scottish translator, Simone Weil, Orwel, etc. Kazin spent some of the war years in England, and has some juicy reports on the literary and political scenes: someone tells him “Dickens, not Marx, made socialists of us.”

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Giving this 3 stars, not because the quality of the work, of course, but that parts of it interested me than others. Lost interest on his long essay about George Orwell's "1984" but was interested in the mention of Orwell's "Down and Out In Paris and London." Other writers of the day mentioned throughout.

[Carla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great anecdotes about Cheever, Orwell, Bellow, Rothko, Edmund Wilson, T. S Eliot, Wright, etc.