On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Jul 2, 2013 - Literary Criticism - 564 pages
“With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism” (The New York Times).
 
An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive—yet accessible—analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America’s golden age—from 1890 to 1940—included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle for realism served as the basis for Kazin’s interpretation.
 
Kazin’s debut was impressive in its scope for such a young author and became a part of his renowned trilogy of literary criticism, which also includes An American Procession and God and the American Writer.
 
“Not only a literary but a moral history . . . The best and most complete treatment we have.” —Lionel Trilling, The Nation
 

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Contents

THE SEARCH FOR REALITY 18901917
THE GREAT LIBERATION 19181929
THE LITERATURE OF CRISES 19301940
Back Matter
Back Cover
Spine
Copyright

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About the author (2013)

Alfred Kazin has lectured and taught at many prestigious universities in both the United States and Europe. His books include A Walker in the City, The Inmost Leaf, and Starting Out in the Thirties.
 

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