God and the American Writer

God and the American Writer
Author :
Publisher : Vintage
Total Pages : 289
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9780804151221
ISBN-13 : 0804151229
Rating : 4/5 (21 Downloads)

Book Synopsis God and the American Writer by : Alfred Kazin

Download or read book God and the American Writer written by Alfred Kazin and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War--so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America. An enthralling book by a major writer. "This is a book about the place of God in the imaginative life of a country that for two centuries countenanced slavery and then engaged in a fratricidal war to end it. For Americans no subject is more compelling or, in its entanglement with the deepest roots of the national soul, more terrible. And no one has ever written as incisively, as movingly, or as unforgivingly about it as Alfred Kazin has here." --Louis Menand "In the era of willful obfuscation, Alfred Kazin is the good, clear word, a brilliant scholar and an original reader. His latest book, God and the American Writer, which comes fifty-five years after On Native Grounds, proves he has lost nothing and gives us everything he has." --David Remnick "American writers have been born into all sorts of religious sects, but have had to struggle in solitude to make sense of God. Alfred Kazin, a cosmos unto himself, has written brilliantly and affectingly of how a dozen or so of our finest authors--poets, novelists, philosophers, and one president--endured and illuminated that struggle. Kazin is sometimes passionate, even fierce, especially in his discussions of slavery and of his hero (and mine), Abraham Lincoln. But, as ever, Kazin's writing is tempered by an enormous American empathy and by his sense of irony about our country and its spiritual predicaments. Spare, sharp, and immensely learned, God and the American Writer is the most moving volume of criticism yet by our greatest living critic." --Sean Wilentz


God and the American Writer Related Books

God and the American Writer
Language: en
Pages: 289
Authors: Alfred Kazin
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-09-11 - Publisher: Vintage

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Language: en
Pages: 180
Authors: Sallie Ketcham
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-09-16 - Publisher: Routledge

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote stories that have defined the American frontier for generations of readers. As both author and character in her own books, she became
How To Write An Autobiographical Novel
Language: en
Pages: 297
Authors: Alexander Chee
Categories: Literary Collections
Type: BOOK - Published: 2018-04-17 - Publisher: HarperCollins

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author
Failure and the American Writer
Language: en
Pages: 205
Authors: Gavin Jones
Categories: Literary Criticism
Type: BOOK - Published: 2014-01-20 - Publisher: Cambridge University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

By exploring the aberrant literary styles of nineteenth-century American writers, Jones suggests failure is just as important as 'success' in US national experi
Mark Twain's Autobiography
Language: en
Pages: 402
Authors: Mark Twain
Categories: Authors, American
Type: BOOK - Published: 1924 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Selected from Mark Twain's typescript.