An American Procession

Alfred Kazin

  • Alfred Kazin was Awarded the First Truman Capote Literary Trust Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin

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, New York Times Book Review

The Procession is wonderfully exciting to read...An authentic entrance, as Whitman called the self, to all facts.
   --Richard Howard, New Republic

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.
   --New Yorker

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.
   --Richard Ellmann, The Atlantic

  • Cover: An American Procession
  • A photo of the author

Alfred Kazin is Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at Hunter College and 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.