In On Native Grounds, the classic work of literary criticism published in 1942, Alfred Kazin helped to define American literature and its relationship to the time and place from which it emerged. The intervening decades have not always been kind to the tradition of literary criticism that he helped create or the literature he helped define. "Where," he writes, "is the writer to be found who will have the inner certainty to see our life with the eyes of faith, and so make the world shine again?" This collection of journal entries follows Kazin's journey into dismay, if not despair, as well as his inward search for something that might provide a foundation for hope.

From Publishers Weekly
These selections from the diaries of noted author (A Walker in the City) and critic Kazin were written from 1938 to 1995; they provide his thoughts on literary and political events that occurred over four decades. Kazin grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, and much of his thought-provoking commentary deals with the impact on his life of the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. Although German Jewish intellectual Hannah Arendt was his friend, he disagreed bitterly with her tone of detachment in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Kazin also evokes the beauty of his first marriage (he married four times) and movingly describes what love has meant to him. He has traveled widely and shares here the experience of visiting Europe and Israel. Throughout the entries, the author expresses pleasure at reading other writers such as Saul Bellow, Simone Weil and Joseph Conrad, and offers occasional criticism. An engrossing memoir. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A selection of the diaries Kazin (Writing Was Everything, LJ 6/15/95) has kept since the late 1930s, this volume reveals a mind and spirit both analytical and passionate. Interested in everything, Kazin can note as naturally the texture of Elizabeth Bishop's hair as he can sense painfully what it's like to live in a culture that views death as personal failure. A friend of Bellow and Malamud, famous since his landmark On Native Grounds (1942), Kazin does not keep an essentially literary diary. Instead, he discusses his religion (and others) and writes movingly about his Russian immigrant parents and his Brooklyn childhood, the Holocaust, postwar Europe, the growing greed of Americans, his own mounting alienation from an increasingly violent New York City, and the rapture and torment of being alive. Highly recommended for all thoughtful readers.?Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Edward Rothstein
Whether describing a literary style or a physical appearance, Mr. Kazin can compress life within a turn of phrase.

From Booklist
Kazin, a passionate and influential literary critic, has been an assiduous journal keeper ever since his college days. Now in his eighties, Kazin has fashioned a captivating, mosaiclike memoir out of carefully selected journal passages covering the years 1938^-95. His cut-and-paste approach shrinks time, so that we watch him fall in and out of love, start and complete various books, travel, and earn Guggenheims and a Fulbright in rapid succession, while his spiritual center, New York City, metamorphoses from a city of dreams into a metropolis of nightmares. We also witness the evolution of his two primary preoccupations, books and the significance and sorrow of being Jewish in the century of the Holocaust. Ever fascinated with literature's role in life and interpretations of life in literature, Kazin shares compelling critical commentary on the work and personality of such pivotal writers as Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, Elie Wiesel, Saul Steinberg, Pauline Kael, Jerzy Kosinski, and Harold Bloom. If you share even half his interests, Kazin's feisty, eloquent, and frank journal will prove arresting. Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews
With over 50 years' worth of raw material to plunder and pick through, Kazin unearths pieces of autobiographical and critical prototypes, along with literary gossip, academic kvetching, private rhapsodies, and 20th-century angst. Overlapping with Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), New York Jew (1978), and Writing Was Everything (1995), these journal selections naturally lose out by comparison, being fragmentary and, for Kazin, unpolished. Yet they still have their own allure, offering the freshness of first impressions and (relatively) uncensored honesty and self-examination. Many of the entries on Kazin's intimate life--several failed marriages, feelings of inadequacy, and old-age ailments--read embarrassingly, but the passages on his public, intellectual life, amplified by the 20th- century history he has witnessed, more than make up for any longueurs. From vantages in London, Italy, Amherst, Yaddo, Stanford, and, naturally, New York, Kazin's portraits of five decades are vivid but sometimes hit-and-miss, but his personal portraits are winning throughout, with vibrant cameos of Zero Mostel, Arthur Miller, Robert Frost, Saul Steinberg, Harold Bloom, and Jerzy Kosinski, to name a few described in these populous pages. Perhaps the most touching portrait here is of his friendship in the 1950s with Josephine Herbst, a penniless, ``politically exhausted relic'' of a leftist activist and proletarian novelist, who shows Kazin her indomitable spunk while reliving the 1930s for him. Other friendships prove more complicated over time: Kazin had an intense but increasingly difficult relationship with Hannah Arendt and became estranged from Saul Bellow. His intellectual relationships, chiefly revolving around his love of America, his hatred of ideology, and his independent Jewish identity, are even more complicated. A composite intellectual and literary album, travelogue, commonplace book, and confessional diary from a leading critic still ``writing up things in my notebook as if my peace depended on it.'' -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Philip RothA
"An impassioned, mentally charged, gorgeously written, splendidly astute historical journal by the most comprehending American reader of the last fifty years."

Edward Rothstein,New York Times Book Review
"Whether describing a literary style or a physical appearance, Mr. Kazin can compress life within a turn of phrase."

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,New York Times
"Kazin writes to possess in these journal entries...some understanding of the God who could have allowed the Holocaust to happen."


"Whether describing a literary style or a physical appearance, Mr. Kazin can compress life within a turn of phrase."


"Kazin writes to possess in these journal entries...some understanding of the God who could have allowed the Holocaust to happen."

Philip Roth
Nothing could be more bitterly poignant, on the eve of America's becoming a literature-free zone cleansed of all but a gulag of comprehending readers, than the publication of an impassioned, mentally charged, gorgeously written, splendidly astute historical journal by the most comprehending American reader of the last fifty years.

Book Description
From the journals of one of our most distinguished critics comes an extraordinary panorama of the intellectual, social and political culture of the last half century. Written with the vividness and power of first-rate fiction, it brings to life the great artists and thinkers who shaped the times, including Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud and Hannah Arendt, and shares Kazin's insights on politics, literature, Jewish life after the Holocaust and American society. It is an immensely rich and resonant memoir from an observer whose eloquence can imbue each moment lived with a lifetime of thought and passion.

About the Author
Alfred Kazin was born in Brooklyn in 1915. His first book, On Native Grounds, published in 1942, revolutionized critical perceptions of American literature. It was followed by many more books of essays and criticism, including A Walker in the City and, most recently, Writing Was Everything. Kazin has taught at Harvard, Smith, Amherst, Hunter College, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1996, he received the Truman Capote Literary Trust's first Lifetime Award in Literary Criticism. Kazin lives in New York City.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

While leading an active life, Kazin has faithfully kept diaries from the late 1930s up to the present. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment offers readers the best of thousands of pages of his journals, comprising an extraordinary picture of intellectual, social, political, and even celebrity life - including such figures as Bernard Berenson, Josephine Herbst, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Hannah Arendt - during the past five and a half decades. Kazin candidly reflects on his four marriages, his feelings about the Holocaust, his criticism of American society, the pleasure and stimulation of reading good writers (Simone Weil, Ignazio Silone, Joseph Conrad, and Saul Bellow, among others), his need to pray, his travels abroad and within the United States, and more.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jewish Book World

This collection of selected entries from the journals of Alfred kazin, one of today's premiere scholars of American literature, covers significant portions of his life from 1938 to the present. Written in the same powerful and lyrical prose of his essays, A Lifetime Burning guides readers with beguiling deftness through Kazin's life growing up in New York, traveling in Europe during and after World War II, and facing the challenges of modern American politics and art.

Kirkus Reviews

With over 50 years' worth of raw material to plunder and pick through, Kazin unearths pieces of autobiographical and critical prototypes, along with literary gossip, academic kvetching, private rhapsodies, and 20th-century angst.

Overlapping with Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), New York Jew (1978), and Writing Was Everything (1995), these journal selections naturally lose out by comparison, being fragmentary and, for Kazin, unpolished. Yet they still have their own allure, offering the freshness of first impressions and (relatively) uncensored honesty and self-examination. Many of the entries on Kazin's intimate life—several failed marriages, feelings of inadequacy, and old-age ailments—read embarrassingly, but the passages on his public, intellectual life, amplified by the 20th- century history he has witnessed, more than make up for any longueurs. From vantages in London, Italy, Amherst, Yaddo, Stanford, and, naturally, New York, Kazin's portraits of five decades are vivid but sometimes hit-and-miss, but his personal portraits are winning throughout, with vibrant cameos of Zero Mostel, Arthur Miller, Robert Frost, Saul Steinberg, Harold Bloom, and Jerzy Kosinski, to name a few described in these populous pages. Perhaps the most touching portrait here is of his friendship in the 1950s with Josephine Herbst, a penniless, "politically exhausted relic" of a leftist activist and proletarian novelist, who shows Kazin her indomitable spunk while reliving the 1930s for him. Other friendships prove more complicated over time: Kazin had an intense but increasingly difficult relationship with Hannah Arendt and became estranged from Saul Bellow. His intellectual relationships, chiefly revolving around his love of America, his hatred of ideology, and his independent Jewish identity, are even more complicated.

A composite intellectual and literary album, travelogue, commonplace book, and confessional diary from a leading critic still "writing up things in my notebook as if my peace depended on it."

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

"An impassioned, mentally charged, gorgeously written, splendidly astute historical journal by the most comprehending American reader of the last fifty years."  — HarperCollins

"Whether describing a literary style or a physical appearance, Mr. Kazin can compress life within a turn of phrase."  — HarperCollins