Word: kazin
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From this belief stemmed the famous, or infamous, Updike style: tiny things described at great length. Rare is the reviewer over 30 who has not at least once twitted Updike for preciosity and overwriting. Yet he is not a showoff, as critics like Alfred Kazin have sometimes claimed ("a brilliant actionlessness ... the world is all metaphor"). In the service of his intense, precise idea of truth, Updike simply loads some moments in his fiction with more words and significance than they can bear. From a story in the 1960s, describing the fragrance that
Speaking in her new tongue, she cultivated influential writers: Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden. Writing in a new manner, she searched out The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As Young-Bruehl observes, Arendt sustained throughout "500 dense, difficult pages a deep, agonized 'Ach!' before the deeds of infamy she analyzed." The book was an angry, detailed journey over Europe's pitchforked roads to "radical evil": imperialism, racism and antiSemitism...
...Feingolds have little aptitude for it. Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin, Leslie Fiedler, Norman Podhoretz, Elizabeth Hardwick, Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Gates, Norman Mailer, William Styron, Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski and Truman Capote do not come to their party. They miss quite a scene. Among the uncelebrated guests is a Holocaust survivor who literally levitates the living room with horror stories. Lucy also rises to the occasion with a Christian-pagan vision rooted in agriculture, bacchanalia and fertility symbols. The reader is left suspended with images of unreachable men locked in "the glory of their martyrdom...
...time literary editor of New Republic magazine, Kazin has been most acclaimed for "On Native Grounds," which had a profound effect of literary criticism after it was published in 1942. Kazin's most recent book, "New York Jew," is the final volume in a three-part, personal history, which details his life since he began writing as a freelance critic in the 1930s...
...Kazin has held special professorships at Smith, New York University and Amherst, was a visiting lecturer at Harvard in 1953 and won a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1977. In most of his work, Kazin has used what critics have called the "traditional" approach, analyzing and discussing relationships between life and history, and history and literature...