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Kazin, Alfred.
GOD AND THE AMERICAN WRITER.
New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Hardcover. First Edition/First Printing. 272 pages. As New/As New. Signed. The author's final work. Now considered a late-modern classic. Published in a relatively small and limited print run as a hardcover original. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Universally acclaimed by critics, readers, and fellow writers, it shows that the great literary critic was writing at the top of his form up to the very end. "The American writer's struggles to reject, accept, sublimate or ignore God is the stem around which Kazin has wound his fascinating insights into the works of our masters. It is a profound pleasure to read such inspired good sense. This praise is especially merited by his writing about the poets Emily Dickinson (Kazin writes about the 'power and depth of her solitude') and Walt Whitman (whose rowdy, sexual, corporeal, and pantheistic poetry, Kazin says, sought to 'rescue religion by replacing it'). Whitman and Dickinson are, in many ways, the yin and yang of American approaches to spirituality. To create literature is to engage reality, to try to wrest some truth from the particulars of a life. This is an almost inevitably religious undertaking and Kazin shows how that struggle informs the work of America's greatest writers, among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, and T. S. Eliot" (Arthur Miller). Written 55 years after his precocious "On Native Grounds", this study feels like a "bookend" to that early, great work. A "must-have" title for Alfred Kazin collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed and dated (in the month and year of publication) in black fountain pen on the front free endpaper by the author: "Alfred Kazin October 30, 1997". This title is no longer in print as a hardcover. This copy has no flaws, a pristine beauty. There is only one other signed copy available online. A very scarce signed copy thus. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century. A flawless copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ALFRED KAZIN TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 0394549686. $125.00 |
