Price, Matthew. "Outsider Artist [on Alfred Kazin]." BOOK FORUM (February/March 2008)

In his early twenties, Kazin set up in room 315 of the New York Public Library and burrowed himself deeply into the American grain for the epic 1942 study On Native Grounds, which was hailed by Lionel Trilling and which read like the culminating work of a senior scholar, not the debut of a neophyte. And this was only the beginning. Kazin soared to the top of the freelance pack in the ’50s and ’60s, had friendships and fallings-out with a who’s who of the thinking classes—Richard Hofstadter, Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Schlesinger, and Daniel Bell, to name some notable examples—traveled abroad, held visiting professorships galore, and garnered a sparkling reputation as a critic, memoirist, and intellectual. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2062.

Dirda, Michael. "Michael Kazin." WASHINGTON POST February 24, 2008.

It is a sad truth that almost any poet or novelist has a shot at immortality, but a critic lives only as long as he keeps writing, keeps in the thick of the action. A decade after his (or her) death, a loyal publisher may bring out a "selected essays" that will prompt a few reminiscences and reconsiderations. After another decade, nothing. Kazin, however, is luckier than most. While he scratched out a living by writing book reviews, teaching at various colleges and universities, and snagging grants (four Guggenheims, numerous other fellowships and regular visits to the artist's retreat Yaddo), he also produced three wonderful works of autobiography, classics of the modern American experience . . . Read the rest here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022102223.html.

Kazin, Michael. "Confronting a Father's Legacy." CHRONICLE REVIEW December 21, 2007.

On Native Grounds: an Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature made the 27-year-old Kazin a phenomenon in the English-speaking world of letters. The sprawling account of major writers from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression broke with the hermetic New Criticism then on the rise among literature professors. He framed each author's work within his or her particular environment of time, place, and sentiment while also narrating the tension between a Whitman-like ethos of democracy and a Menckenesque scorn of the foolish masses. The method, inspired by Vernon L. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought, allowed him to evaluate Upton Sinclair and the anonymous authors of the Works Progress Administration guidebooks alongside Wharton, Dreiser, and Faulkner. The result was a saga of the national culture festooned with keen judgments and wit. Reviewers more than praised the book; they paid tribute. Trilling called it "not only a history but a moral history." Howard Mumford Jones considered it the best study ever written about the nation's literature. From Britain, Harold Laski declared that Kazin was "among the six best critical minds America has had since Emerson." . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=GWWwpfkbp842hjzFzxbSgRfhr5h8rqwn.