Writing Was Everything

Rating:
Summary: A Reader's Critic
Review: Alfred Kazin's death last year robbed America of a rare character in the world of arts and letters: a humble critic. WRITING WAS EVERYTHING offers the reader a glimpse of that wonderful mind that spoke to the reader, not to the theorist. Kazin mourned the days when litersture "was held sacred". This delightful little book is the perfect summation of a near perfect observer of American writing.

Rating:
Summary: A Treasure; The Best Intro to Kazin
Review: I can only add my voice to the words of the previous reviewer; I think this wonderful book endears itself immediately to most readers simply by being so humble. Kazin mourns the current state of literary academia, in which it seems that criticism can exist only as a political philosophy or as an elitist game of celebrity-making. Rather, Kazin aspires to (and fondly remembers) literary criticism as a effort of love by one writer for another. As he says in this book, "what brings us closer to a work of art is not instruction, but another work of art."

If you love books, and especially if you dislike the elitism of the academic establishment, you will love Kazin. "Writing Was Everything" is also a great introduction to Kazin. It is very slim--I read it in one sitting--and is very readable, as it is as much autobiography as academic cri de coeur. Even this short work is peppered with pithy insights, and is helpful in understanding a number of the important novelists and poets of our time. "Writing Was Everything" is well worth the few hours it takes to read, and will likely be your invitation to reading others of Kazin's works.

Rating:
Summary: A Treasure; The Best Intro to Kazin
Review: I can only add my voice to the words of the previous reviewer; I think this wonderful book endears itself immediately to most readers simply by being so humble. Kazin mourns the current state of literary academia, in which it seems that criticism can exist only as a political philosophy or as an elitist game of celebrity-making. Rather, Kazin aspires to (and fondly remembers) literary criticism as a effort of love by one writer for another. As he says in this book, "what brings us closer to a work of art is not instruction, but another work of art."

If you love books, and especially if you dislike the elitism of the academic establishment, you will love Kazin. "Writing Was Everything" is also a great introduction to Kazin. It is very slim--I read it in one sitting--and is very readable, as it is as much autobiography as academic cri de coeur. Even this short work is peppered with pithy insights, and is helpful in understanding a number of the important novelists and poets of our time. "Writing Was Everything" is well worth the few hours it takes to read, and will likely be your invitation to reading others of Kazin's works.

Rating:
Summary: An engaging champion of forceful narratives
Review: Originally a series of three lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 1994, divided as before.during/after the war (WWII), this book covers a lot of ground in 152 small pages. He mixes his own life from being a scrambling book reviewer during the Depression, to being some kind of cultural attaché to the US military machine in England during and immediately after World War II, to being a literature professor at various Eastern Seaboard Universities after it with analyses of many writers., many of whom he knew, and about whom he supplies insightful recollections .

Although it sounds patently implausible, Kazin has interesting things to say about Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Czeslaw Milosz, Edwin Muir, Flannery O'Connor, George Orwell, Katherine Anne Porter, Henry Roth, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, Simone Weil, Edmund Wilson, Richard Wright and/or their writings in this short space (originally, short time), along with apposite quotations from Flaubert and Proust, and reflections on Mark Rothko.

The vignettes and condensed analyses are pithy, but I don't really understand how Kazin supposed they cohered, or what their cumulative point is. I think that the past tense of the title contrasts with more recent worship of theory and political correctness instead of contemplating the universes written in what was the canon of the 1950s (with Eliot expelled, Wright and Milosz added). Kazin was an engaging mandarin, judging by his performance here, as well as from his longer books.