Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Story Tellers from Hemingway to Mailer

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University of Notre Dame Press, 1974 - Fiction - 334 pages
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Contents

A DREAM OF ORDER
1
2
21
3
69
Copyright

7 other sections not shown

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absurd American become believe Bellow Black black humor Burroughs Capote Carson McCullers characters Charles Kinbote Cheever Clutter comedy comic consciousness contemporary Cozzens criticism D. H. Lawrence death dream Ellison emotions everything existence experience expression fact fascinated Faulkner feel fiction Flannery O'Connor gift Hemingway Hemingway's hero human Humbert Humbert imagination intellectual Jane Bowles Jewish Jews Joan Didion Joyce Katherine Anne Porter killed literary literature live look Mailer Malamud man's middle class mind moral Moviegoer murder Nabokov narrative Nat Turner nature Negro ness never novel novelist O'Hara obsession one's Pale Fire passion perfect protagonist reader reality Roth Russian Salinger Salinger's scene seems sense Seymour Glass short story Singer social society somehow South struggle style T. S. Eliot things thought tion tradition truth turn Updike victims violence voice Vonnegut Walker Percy woman women writing wrote young

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About the author (1974)

Alfred Kazin, a literary critic and professor of English literature, was born in Brooklyn and educated at City College and Columbia University. Kazin established his own critical reputation in the mid-1940s with On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American literature. He started work on it at the suggestion of Carl Van Doren in 1939 while, he explains, "half-heartedly doing a master's essay at Columbia on Gibbon and wondering what would ever become of me or of the maddening age." His later work, Bright Book of American Life (1973), is both a recapitulation of modernism and an evaluation of American writers who have achieved prominence since 1945. Modernism, a favorite topic of Kazin, is in his view a literary revolution marked by spontaneity and individuality but lacking in precisely the mass culture appeal necessary to its survival. Contemporaries (1962) includes reflective essays on travel, five essays on Freud, and some very perceptive essays on literary and political matters. The final section, "The Critic's Task," concerns itself with the critic's function within a popular and an academic context and with critical theory and principles. Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) describes Kazin's early years with The New Republic as book reviewer and evaluates his contemporaries in a period when the depression and radical political thought, pro and con, deeply affected literary production. In the midst of the current antihumanistic trend in literary theory, Kazin remains a literary critic of the old school, believing in the relevance of literature to modern life. Alfred Kazin died on June 5, 1998.

Bibliographic information

QR code for Bright Book of Life
TitleBright Book of Life: American Novelists and Story Tellers from Hemingway to Mailer
NDP. 262
AuthorAlfred Kazin
Editionreprint
PublisherUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 1974
Original fromthe University of Michigan
DigitizedNov 10, 2006
ISBN0268006644, 9780268006648
Length334 pages
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Fiction / General
  
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