God and the American Writer
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| Author(s) | Alfred Kazin |
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| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
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| This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of… | |
This is the culminating work of the finest living critic of American literature. Alfred Kazin brings a lifetime of thought and reading to the triumphant elucidation of his fascinating and slippery subjects: what the meaning of God has been for American writers, and how those writers, from the New England Calvinists to William Faulkner, have expressed it. In a series of trenchant critical studies of writers as divergent as Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Lincoln, Whitman, Dickinson, Twain, William James, Eliot, Frost, and Faulkner, Kazin gives a profound sense of each, and his quotations from their works are artfully chosen to pursue the main theme. The centerpiece of the book is the reflection in American writing of the great American tragedy, the Civil War—so deeply involved in the whole complex issue of religion in America.
An enthralling book by a major writer.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
Arthur Miller, who has wrestled an angel or two of his own, had this to say about Kazin’s literary/theological project, God and the American Writer: “The American writer’s struggles to reject, accept, sublimate, or ignore God is the stem around which Kazin has wound his fascinating insights into the works of our masters. It is a profound pleasure to read such inspired good sense.” This praise is especially merited by his writing about the poets Emily Dickinson (Kazin writes about the “power and depth of her solitude”), and Walt Whitman (whose rowdy, sexual, corporeal, and pantheistic poetry, Kazin says, sought to “rescue religion by replacing it”). Whitman and Dickinson are, in many ways, the yin and yang of American approaches to spirituality. To create literature is to engage reality, to try to wrest some truth from the particulars of a life. This is an almost inevitably religious undertaking, and Kazin shows how that struggle informs the work of America’s greatest writers, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot.
