Word: kazin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Steinbeck earned his first serious acclaim when The Red Pony appeared in the North American Review. But years afterward, critics still regarded him as a newcomer. Alfred Kazin praised him with faint damns: "After a dozen books Stein beck still looks like a distinguished apprentice, and what is so striking in his work is its inconclusiveness, his moving approach to human life and yet his failure to be creative with...
...encouraged ranged as widely as Irwin Shaw and Vladimir Nabokov, he seems to have done more good than anything else." Cheever may be the only person in the world who would mention these writers in the same sentence. There are many who would not mention Shaw at all. Alfred Kazin's massive study of American fiction, On Native Grounds, has no room for the author. Edmund Wilson's definitive survey, Classics and Commercials, gives space to only one Shaw: George Bernard Today the Irwin Shaw Show means more than the Irwin Shaw books: Rich Man, Poor...
...making errors, he freed the language from cant and proved a tonic influence on writers from Sherwood Anderson to Norman Mailer. His tragedy was in staying too long at the zoo until his fellow visitors began to notice a want of sympathy and substance. Back in 1942, Critic Alfred Kazin observed that Mencken's "conception of the aesthetic life . . . was monstrous in its frivolity and ignorance." Others soon echoed the critique. Finally, even the subject obliquely acknowledged it. In Six Men, Alistair Cooke recalls a 1955 visit. The invalided Mencken wondered when Poet Edgar Lee Masters had passed...
...Kazin's portraits of these people are usually thoughtful and affectionate, often with a redeeming touch of asperity. He visits T.S. Eliot and finds "a man easily cornered and deathly afraid of being cornered." Edmund Wilson is presented as an Everest of intelligence, taste and dedication, but Kazin can also write: "His greatest interest in any subject was his learning...
...Kazin's style is regularly tutorial rather than autobiographical; a succession of wives and mistresses make brief entrances and exits between mini-essays. Those essays, though, pick up nearly all of the slack of the personal narrative. They recreate some of the events that agitated his circle during the past three decades-the post-Holocaust trauma. Red baiting in the '50s. radicalism in the '60s-and show who lined up where and for what reasons. Kazin himself often wound up in the middle and caught grief from both sides. His scrupulous, sometimes pained explanations make his history...