Books, Arts & Manners: The Eye and I

God and the American Writer, by Alfred Kazin (Knopf, 259 pp., $25)

LET us begin by praising Alfred Kazin. Now in his eighties, he has lived long with books, and literature matters greatly to him. All that he has written since On Native Ground (1942) testifies to that. Today, if you drop in on an English-literature class, you are likely to hear a lecture on kinky sex, amateur epistemology, Marxism, racial oppression, the Third World, or the atom bomb. What a relief to turn to Mr. Kazin.

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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God and the American Writer, by Alfred Kazin (Knopf, 259 pp., $25)

LET us begin by praising Alfred Kazin. Now in his eighties, he has lived long with books, and literature matters greatly to him. All that he has written since On Native Ground (1942) testifies to that. Today, if you drop in on an English-literature class, you are likely to hear a lecture on kinky sex, amateur epistemology, Marxism, racial oppression, the Third World, or the atom bomb. What a relief to turn to Mr. Kazin.