The Inmost Leaf: A Selection of Essays

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Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979 - Literary Criticism - 273 pages
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One of America's foremost literary critics presents twenty-eight essays on American and European writers, including Joyce, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner.

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Contents

The Death of James Joyce
3
Our Passion Is Our Task
9
Proust in His Letters
21
Copyright

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The Inmost Leaf: A Selection of Essays
Alfred Kazin
Snippet view - 1959
The Inmost Leaf: A Selection of Essays
Alfred Kazin
Snippet view - 1955

Common terms and phrases

American artist audience beautiful Beethoven believe Blake Bulkington character Chase Chekhov contemporary created creative critics culture Cummings D. H. Lawrence Dostoevsky Dreiser E. E. Cummings Edmund Wilson Ellen Glasgow English everything experience Ezra Pound fact father Faulkner feel felt Fitzgerald Flaubert friends frontier Gatsby genius gift give Gorky heart Hemingway Henry James human ideas imagination inner innocence intellectual Italian Italy James Joyce journal Joyce Kafka kind knew Lawrence Lawrence's letters liberal literary literature living look lost man's Mary Martin means Melville Melville's mind modern moral mystic myth nature Nenni ness never novel novelist passion Perkins poem poet poetry political Prophetic Books Proust Ruskin's Russian seems sense Sherwood Anderson simply social society spirit story struggle style symbols theater things Thoreau thought tion Tolstoy tradition Turgenev Tyger vision whole words writer wrote young

About the author (1979)

Alfred Kazin, a literary critic and professor of English literature, was born in Brooklyn on June 5, 1915. He was 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. 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 The Inmost Leaf
TitleThe Inmost Leaf: A Selection of Essays
A Harvest/HBJ book
Harvest / HBJ book
Volume 141 of Noonday paperback
AuthorAlfred Kazin
Editionreprint
PublisherHarcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979
ISBN0156443988, 9780156443982
Length273 pages
Subjects › 

Literary Criticism / General
  
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