Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarkable novel of the pre-Civil War South. Uncle Tom's Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate indictment of slavery and for its presentation of Tom, "a man of humanity," as the first black hero in American fiction. Labeled racist and condescending by some contemporary critics, it remains a shocking, controversial, and powerful work -- exposing the attitudes of white nineteenth-century society toward "the peculiar institution" and...
Uncle Tom, Topsy, Sambo, Simon Legree, little Eva: their names are American bywords, and all of them are characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe's remarka...
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.
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...
God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner than any study I have read in the past fifty-five years--that is, since the same author's On Native Grounds. --Louis S. Auchincloss This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature.Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists...
God and the American Writer does more to illuminate the fundamental purposes and motivations of our greatest writers from Hawthorne to Faulkner than a...
First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is widely regarded as Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in the bleak, barren winter landscape of New England, it is the tragic tale of a simple man, bound to the demands of his farm and his tyrannical, sickly wife, Zeena, and driven by his star-crossed love for Zeena's young cousin, Mattie Silver. "In its spare, chilling creation of rural isolation, hardscrabble poverty and wintry landscape," writes Alfred Kazin in his afterword, "Ethan Frome overwhelms the reader as a drama of irresistible...
First published in 1911, Ethan Frome is widely regarded as Edith Wharton's most revealing novel and her finest achievement in fiction. Set in t...
As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-century America, Michael Gold was an important presence on the American cultural scene for more than three decades. Beginning in the 1920s his was a powerful journalistic voice for social change and human rights, and Jews Without Money--the author's only novel--is a passionate record of the times. First published in 1930, this fictionalized autobiography offered an unusually candid look at the thieves, gangsters, and ordinary citizens who struggled against brutal odds in lower East Side Manhattan. Like Henry Roth's Call It...
As a writer and political activist in early-twentieth-century America, Michael Gold was an important presence on the American cultural scene for m...
Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of intellectual life for three decades in the middle of the 20th century, tells his own story and with it a history of contemporary American letters.
Alfred Kazin, one of the central figures of intellectual life for three decades in the middle of the 20th century, tells his own story and with it a h...
At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily...
At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known...
