<div>A literary icon&rsquo;s &ldquo;singular and beautiful&rdquo; memoir of growing up as a first-generation Jewish American in Brownsville, Brooklyn (The New Yorker). A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues&mdash;but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new. With vivid imagery and sensual detail&mdash;the smell of half-sour pickles, the dry rattle of newspapers, the women in their shapeless flowered housedresses&mdash;Alfred Kazin recounts his boyhood walks through this working-class community, and his eventual foray across the river to &ldquo;the city,&rdquo; the mysterious, compelling Manhattan, where treasures like the New York Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum beckoned. Eventually, he would travel even farther, building a life around books and language and literature and exploring all that the world had to offer. &ldquo;The whole texture, color, and sound of life in this tenement realm . . . is revealed as tapestried, as dazzling, as full of lush and varied richness as an Arabian bazaar.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times</div>

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A Walker in the City

<div>The author of On Writing Well presents stories and advice on the writing process from Frank McCourt, Annie Dillard, and many more. For anyone who enjoys reading memoirs&mdash;or is thinking about writing one&mdash;this collection offers a master class from nine distinguished authors: Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson. &ldquo;Annie Dillard talks of her Pittsburgh childhood and her moment of waking to the world outside. Russell Baker explains why his first draft of Growing Up was so bad that he had to start over again. Alfred Kazin finds that writing about his Brooklyn childhood connected him with the great tradition of Emerson and Whitman. Toni Morrison tells why her fiction uses not only family history but the slave narratives of her people. Lewis Thomas traces the evolution of his singular self from primeval bacteria to contemporary scientist whose drive to be useful is the most fundamental of all biological necessities. . . . Delightful and instructive.&rdquo; &mdash;Library Journal </div>

Inventing the Truth

<div>&ldquo;With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism&rdquo; (The New York Times). An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive&mdash;yet accessible&mdash;analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America&rsquo;s golden age&mdash;from 1890 to 1940&mdash;included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin&rsquo;s interpretation. Kazin&rsquo;s debut was impressive in its scope for such a young author and became a part of his renowned trilogy of literary criticism, which also includes An American Procession and God and the American Writer. &ldquo;Not only a literary but a moral history . . . The best and most complete treatment we have.&rdquo; &mdash;Lionel Trilling, The Nation </div>

Alfred Kazin
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Books By Alfred Kazin (2 Books)

A Walker in the City

On Native Grounds

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Books By Alfred Kazin (2 Books)

A Walker in the City

On Native Grounds

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© 2024 OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA