Synopses & Reviews
Alfred Kazin was Awarded the First Truman Capote Literary Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin
Review
The Procession is wonderfully exciting to read...An authentic entrance, as Whitman called the self, to all facts. New York Times Book Review
Review
Kazin is one of the most seasoned and subtle critics of American literature. He has always balanced an awareness of the pressure of external circumstances with a sense that books are also a series of private meetings between authors and ink bottles. He sees writers as at once facing the world and facing their desks. New Yorker
Review
With An American Procession, Alfred Kazin confirms a reservation in the front tier of the reviewing stand, next to his eminent predecessors Van Wyck Brooks and Edmund Wilson. I have nothing but praise for An American Procession. Alfred Kazin himself can write brilliantly, catching the 'very essence' of an author in an epithet or a phrase...He is a first-rate comprehender, explainer, and savorer. The power of his book lies, in the last analysis, in Mr. Kazin's profound instinct for style. Marcus Cunliffe
Review
A sense of caring intimacy lifts Kazin's survey above the usual inventory of masterworks...An American Procession is a refresher in the best sense...It vivaciously refreshes our awareness. Richard Howard - New Republic
Synopsis
In this illuminating study of the "crucial century" (1830-1930), Alfred Kazin views the major figures in American writing, beginning in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution, and ending on the eve of the 1930s with modernism--Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald--and with the revelation of the "postponed power" of those who had been modern before their time--Henry Adams, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson.
About the Author
Alfred Kazinis Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at <>Hunter Collegeand the <>Graduate Center, <>City University of New York. He is the author and editor of many books, including, most recently, A Writer's America: Landscape in American Literature.
Table of Contents
Preface, 1996
Prologue, 1918: Old Man in a Dry Month
Part One. The Self as Power: America When Young, 1830-1865
1. The Priest Departs, the Divine Literatus Comes: Emerson
2. Things Are in the Saddle and Ride Mankind: Emerson
3. A Lover and His Guilty Land: Thoreau
4. The Ghost Sense: Hawthorne and Poe
5. A More Perfect Union: Whitman to Lincoln
Part Two. Modern Times, 1865-1900
6. "Melville Is Dwelling Somewhere in New York"
7. Wrecked, Solitary, Here: Dickinson's Room of Her Own
8. Creatures of Circumstance: Mark Twain
9. The James Country
10. Chicago and "the East": Dreiser, Adams, Mark Twain
11. The Youth: Stephen Crane
Part Three. Ruling Style: History and the Moderns, 1900-1929
12. A Postponed Power: Henry Adams
13. Going to Europe: Eliot and Pound
14. An American Tragedy and The Sound and the Fury
15. Hemingway the Painter
Retrospect, 1932: The Twenties and the Great American Thing
Index