Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin (1915–1998) was an author and literary critic who often wrote on the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America. Philip Roth called him “America’s best reader of American literature in this century.” Kazin's most acclaimed book was On Native Grounds, published in 1942. His memoir, A Walker in the City, recalled a childhood in Brooklyn.

Articles by this Author

Why "Light in August" is Faulkner's Most Powerful Novel, September 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 5

In William Faulkner’s greatest work, a bitter epic of violence and despair resolves itself on a note of love and longing.

Where Would Emerson Find His Scholar Now?, December 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 8

His speech was called “our intellectual Declaration of Independence.” Its theme was the universe itself; its hero, Man Thinking. Now, one hundred and seventy-five years later, a noted scholar sees Emerson’s great vision as both more beleaguered and more urgent than ever.

Southwestward The Great American Space, April 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 3

A journey through a wide and spellbinding land, and a look at the civilization along its edges.

Sinclair Lewis Got It Exactly Right, October/November 1985 | Vol. 36, No. 6

He recreated with perfect pitch every tone of voice, every creak and rattle of an America that was disintegrating, even as it gave birth to the country we inhabit today.

HEMINGWAY & FITZGERALD: THE COST OF BEING AMERICAN, April/May 1984 | Vol. 35, No. 3

The work of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald virtually defined what it meant to be American in the first half of this century

Fear Of The City 1783 To 1983, February/March 1983 | Vol. 34, No. 2

The city has been a lure for millions, but most of the great American minds have been appalled by its excesses. Here an eminent observer, who knows firsthand the city’s threat, surveys the subject.

Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.