Alfred Kazin

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Alfred Kazin (born June 5, 1915 in Brooklyn , † June 5, 1998 in Manhattan ) was an American author and literary critic. Many of his publications describe the experiences of immigrants in the United States in the early 20th century.

Life

Alfred Kazin was a son of the painter Charles Kazin and the tailor Gita Kazin, nee. Fagelman. His parents were Russian immigrants of the Jewish faith who also had a daughter. Alfred Kazin grew up in the Brownsville (Brooklyn) neighborhood of New York . He graduated from the City College of New York (CCNY) in 1935 with a Bachelor of Social Science. From 1937 to 1942 he worked at the CCNY as an English tutor. In 1938 he obtained a Masters in English from Columbia University . From 1941 he worked at the New School for Social Research . In 1940 and 1947 he received a Guggenheim grant and in 1945 a Rockefeller grant .

In 1942, Kazin published his first book, On native grounds . The three-part work describes the development of American literature from 1890 to 1940. It received good reviews and made Kazin known in the literary scene of Manhattan. He then worked for a year as a literary editor for the political magazine The New Republic . In 1944 he worked briefly for the business magazine Fortune . In 1951 Kazin's second book, A walker in the city , appeared, in which he made his development as a young man the subject.

In the following ten years, Kazin worked as a visiting professor at Harvard University (1952), Smith College (1953/1954), Amherst College (1955 to 1958), University of Puerto Rico (1959), New York University (1960), Princeton University (1961) and University of California at Berkeley (1962). In 1963 he was an English professor at Stony Brook University . From 1973 he taught English as a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center .

Kazin has written reviews and essays for magazines such as American Mercury , Partisan Review , The New Yorker, and Harper's Magazine . He published several collections of essays (often with book reviews previously published in magazines) and literary critical reflections on various writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald , William Blake and Theodore Dreiser . There were also two other books in which he described his life: Starting out in the thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978).

Kazin has received several awards for his work. Among other things, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960 and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1965, and in 1966 he received the George Polk Award in the "Critique" category. In 1995 he won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award for life's work as a literary critic. In 1996 he received the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, a $ 100,000 award from the Truman Capote Literary Trust.

Kazin was married four times, first to Natasha Dohn, the daughter of Russian immigrants, and after her divorce for three years with Caroline Bookman. From this second marriage his son, the historian Michael Kazin (* 1948) emerged. In 1952, Alfred Kazin married the author and university professor Ann Birstein , who was involved in his publication The Works of Anne Frank (1959). The couple raised Kazin's son and had a daughter, who later became a university professor, Cathrael Kazin . In 1983 Kazin finally married the author Judith Dunford.

In 1998, on his 83rd birthday, Kazin died in his home on the Upper West Side (Manhattan) of cancer.

Publications (selection)

Bronze plaque with a quote from Kazin's autobiographical work New York Jew (1978) on the Library Walk in Manhattan
  • On native grounds: an interpretation of modern American prose. Reynal & Hitchcock, New York 1942.
    • The American Novel: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Fiction. Overseas editions, New York 1942.
  • A walker in the city. Harcourt, Brace, New York 1951.
    • My streets in New York. Translated into German by Erika Meier, Walter, Olten 1966.
  • F. Scott Fitzgerald: the man and his work. World Pub. Co., Cleveland 1951.
  • with Ann Birstein: The Works of Anne Frank. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, NY 1959.
  • Contemporaries. (Essays) Little, Brown, Boston 1962.
  • Starting out in the thirties. Little, Brown, Boston 1965.
  • New York Jew. Knopf, New York 1978.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Kazin, Alfred In: Harry Schneidermann, Itzhak J. Carmin (ed.): Who's Who in World Jewry: a Biographical Dictionary of Outstanding Jews. Who's Who in World Jewry, New York 1955.
  2. ^ A b Alfred Kazin In: Lakeville Press: American Jewish biographies. Facts on File, New York 1982.
  3. ^ Members: Alfred Kazin. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 6, 2019 .
  4. ↑ 1966 George Polk Award Winners liu.edu, accessed on May 11, 2016.
  5. ↑ Past Awards bookcritics.org, accessed on May 11, 2016th
  6. ^ First Capote Award Goes to Alfred Kazin. In: The New York Times . January 10, 1996, accessed May 11, 2016.
  7. ^ Wilborn Hampton: Alfred Kazin, the author Who Wrote of Literature and Himself, Is Dead at 83. In: The New York Times . June 6, 1998, accessed May 11, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Kazin, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author and literary critic
DATE OF BIRTH June 5, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Brooklyn
DATE OF DEATH June 5, 1998
Place of death Manhattan