On Vapid Grounds

New York Jew records the progress toward senescence of a literary critic whose best work was done in his youth. This curious autobiographical narrative starts with the week in 1942 that Alfred Kazin 1) published his first book, On Native Grounds, 2) assumed the literary editor’s post at The New Republic, and 3) first moved onto Manhattan Island. He was 27 years old at the time. On Native Grounds was a lyrical narrative concerning American prose literature from the 1890s until the start of World War II; the young Kazin succeeded in applying an impressionistic if somewhat lumpy style to a vast assortment of materials, giving comparable space to Thorstein Veblen, Edmund Wilson, Charles Beard, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and a pack of others. His brooding little essay on Dreiser was good enough to move at least one 16-year-old reader to high admiration thirty years later.

Since that time, however, the lumps have moved front and center in Kazin’s writing; the book preceding this one, called Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer, was a model of garbled prose and eccentric distinctions. The critic appeared to have grown more restless with age.

MR

About the Author

Mitchell S. Ross

New York Jew records the progress toward senescence of a literary critic whose best work was done in his youth. This curious autobiographical narrative starts with the week in 1942 that Alfred Kazin 1) published his first book, On Native Grounds, 2) assumed the literary editor’s post at The New Republic, and 3) first moved onto Manhattan Island. He was 27 years old at the time. On Native Grounds was a lyrical narrative concerning American prose literature from the 1890s until the start of World War II; the young Kazin succeeded in applying an impressionistic if somewhat lumpy style to a vast assortment of materials, giving comparable space to Thorstein Veblen, Edmund Wilson, Charles Beard, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and a pack of others. His brooding little essay on Dreiser was good enough to move at least one 16-year-old reader to high admiration thirty years later.

Since that time, however, the lumps have moved front and center in Kazin’s writing; the book preceding this one, called Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer, was a model of garbled prose and eccentric distinctions. The critic appeared to have grown more restless with age.