Word: kazin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics generally agree that Naipaul's fortunes are on a permanent foundation. Irving Howe, no pushover, says, "There can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses him." Alfred Kazin calls Naipaul the "most compelling master of social truth that I know." The writer himself is not overly responsive to praise. He claims to dislike interviews and awards and describes himself simply as a "maker of books." Though England is his base and spiritual home, he prefers the convenience and anonymity of large hotels and jetliners where, 30,000 ft. above the chaos, he can clasp a pillow to his stomach...
...large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Such an abominable opinion cannot be excused, yet Eliot has defenders who find the issue regrettable but overblown. British Poet D.J. Enright notes, "A friend of mine made the best observation: 'But good Lord, he did not like anybody.' " Critic Alfred Kazin seems inclined to set Eliot's lapses in a larger context: "As a writer of Jewish background, if I had to ignore all the great writers who made anti-Semitic comments, I'd have nothing to read...
Self-promotion and celebrity may not bring down Western civilization, though they have harmed writers with considerably more to show and say than Janowitz and other young bright lights of the moment. F. Scott Fitzgerald paid the price of fame, but, says the critic and memoirist Alfred Kazin, "he wanted to be the best. I don't hear anyone talking of being the best today. Books are now made as movies are. There is no belief that a book has a long life. Writers have abandoned the idea of making a masterpiece. Now they are Hollywood venture capitalists and accomplices...
...Saul Bellow in a letter to Josephine Herbst. He had plenty of company. During her long literary life Herbst attracted such disparate admirers as Maxwell Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Ernest Hemingway, James T. Farrell and John Cheever. When she died in 1969 at the age of 76, Critic Alfred Kazin, who had once dismissed her work as "desperate pedestrianism," wrote that he had never known any other writer who was "so solid, so joyous, so giving...
...quite matched his talent for self-destruction. He was forever negotiating with a series of authority figures: God, Father Flye, Time Inc. Indeed, Bergreen concludes, Agee cast Time in the multiple roles of "his home, his school, his monastery," to the bewilderment of fellow employees like Dwight Macdonald, Alfred Kazin and Robert Fitzgerald...