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“... published a book in ten years. And the novel turned even some sympathetic reviewers into hangmen. Alfred Kazin reported feeling ‘embarrassment, even pity, that so important a writer can make such a travesty of himself’. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for The Old Man and the Sea, and the next year a (greatly deserved) Nobel Prize. But he was being ...”

“... expansion, extrajudicial killings and demolitions. Today, an extreme manifestation of what Alfred Kazin, writing in his private journal in 1988, called ‘militant, daredevil, fuck-you-all Israel’ also serves as a palliative to many existential anxieties within the Anglo-American ruling classes. In Our American Israel (2018), Amy Kaplan ...”

“... from whence they came’, even when she’s impressed by it. McCarthy’s authority, according to Alfred Kazin, increased in relation to ‘the growing conviction of meaninglessness in the air’, and the climax of this process was The Group, where she’d planned what she described as a ‘compendious history of that faith in progress of the Thirties ...”

“... the critics, the obverse was true: Lionel Trilling wrote fiction, Harold Rosenberg wrote poetry, Alfred Kazin wrote his memoirs. They weren’t just critics: they were writers. With the rise of mass education after World War Two, the demand for English professors grew, more university presses were established, and increasing specialisation occurred as ...”

“... riots of 1967, which Oates witnessed while teaching in the city. Writing in Harper’s in 1971, Alfred Kazin praised her openness to ‘social havoc and turbulence’ and her affinity with the ‘avalanche’ of the times. But five years later, she no longer seemed in touch with the zeitgeist. Hilton Kramer dismissed her novels in Commentary as the ...”

“... The fourth and final novel, Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), did better, winning the admiration of Alfred Kazin and Carson McCullers. Still, a good portion of the 1962 interview concerns Baker’s sense of failure. Twenty-five years into her career, she was not among the handful of writers considered the very best. The fact desolated her. Baker’s ...”

“... from the get-go. Intellectuals were back in vogue. Schlesinger brokered lunch between Kennedy and Alfred Kazin (their exchanges appear to have been weightier than the mutual flattery of those between Obama and Marilynne Robinson). But Schlesinger’s main duties kicked in after the assassination. A Thousand Days, Schlesinger’s 1032-page memorial – a ...”

“... Above all, the translated Yiddish dialogue is splendid: ‘almost too splendid’, according to Alfred Kazin, who wrote the introduction to a 1991 edition of the novel, since it makes everyday idioms sound impossibly elevated. ‘Even the fixed word wavers, eh?’ Albert snarls when he thinks he’s caught his wife backtracking. ‘We must cleave to ...”

“... that we are living in a safe, never perturbed, solar system and a safe, never perturbed past. Alfred Kazin, writing in the New Yorker, understood that this was part of Velikovsky’s appeal, and tellingly linked the great pseudoscientist with the Doomsday warnings of orthodox atomic scientists: Velikovsky’s work ‘plays right into the small talk ...”

“... found sustained exposure to Bellow’s vanity and droit de seigneur too hard on the eyes; so did Alfred Kazin, who had known him when they were both terriers on the Partisan Review scene and was now put out by Bellow’s imperial aura of serene self-possession and superiority, ‘sitting congealed like frozen matzoh ball soup in his conceit’, and the ...”

“... Degas); travelled to Egypt and the Caribbean; in New York they knew Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Alfred Kazin, John Cheever, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Robert Penn Warren, Eleanor Clark.When Hazzard met Steegmuller, he was engaged in an on-off relationship with another woman, or so he said. ‘Everybody knew’ he was gay, according to Olubas’s ...”

“... mise-en-scène as farce. ‘I don’t think his book has anything real about it whatsoever,’ Alfred Kazin wrote in the New York Times, comparing Wild Side to the ‘harrowing and grimly honest’ Man with the Golden Arm, which ‘hurt like a blow’. The New York intellectuals now dismissed Algren as a Thirties leftover. Although he himself had ...”

“... East’s only democracy. In the journals he kept from the 1960s onwards, the literary critic Alfred Kazin alternates between bafflement and scorn in charting the psycho-dramas of personal identity that helped to create Israel’s most loyal constituency abroad:The present period of Jewish ‘success’ will some day be remembered as one of the ...”

“... Lennon often puts his finger on the kind of detail that makes sense of Mailer’s character. Pearl Kazin (Alfred Kazin’s sister) was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar and her manner was said to be quite superior. She deployed it over the years to get American novelists to jump through hoops. And when she asked Mailer if ...”

“... smoke hanging over noisy rooms on the Upper West Side or Greenwich Village where Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg and a supporting cast of kibitzers engaged in rhetorical (and, in Greenberg’s case, actual) fisticuffs. Like many men of ideas with impossibly high standards of intellectual probity, they could also be snarly ...”