An American Procession - Softcover

Kazin is one of the most seasoned and subtle critics of American literature. He has always balanced an awareness of the pressure of external circumstances with a sense that books are also a series of private meetings between authors and ink bottles. He sees writers as at once facing the world and facing their desks.--Richard Ellmann "The Atlantic " A sense of caring intimacy lifts Kazin's survey above the usual inventory of masterworks...An American Procession is a refresher in the best sense...It vivaciously refreshes our awareness.--New Yorker The Procession is wonderfully exciting to read...An authentic entrance, as Whitman called the self, to all facts.--Richard Howard "New Republic " With An American Procession, Alfred Kazin confirms a reservation in the front tier of the reviewing stand, next to his eminent predecessors Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson. I have nothing but praise for An American Procession. Alfred Kazin himself can write brilliantly, catching the 'very essence' of an author in an epithet or a phrase...He is a first-rate comprehender, explainer, and savorer. The power of his book lies, in the last analysis, in Mr. Kazin's profound instinct for style.--Marcus Cunliffe "New York Times Book Review "

In this illuminating study of the crucial century (1830-1930), Alfred Kazin views the major figures in American writing, beginning in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution, and ending on the eve of the 1930s with modernism--Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald--and with the revelation of the postponed power of those who had been modern before their time--Henry Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.