Writing Was Everything (Identities and Issues in Literature)
At a glance:
- Author: Alfred Kazin
- First Published: 1995
- Genres: Criticism, Nonfiction, Memoir
- Subjects: Authors or writers, Literature, World War II, Immigration or emigration, Lectures or lecturing, Holocaust, Jewish, Jews and Gentiles
The Work
Writing Was Everything, originally delivered as the William E. Massey, Sr., lectures at Harvard University, is Alfred Kazin’s account of his early years as a critic. More than a memoir, the book offers a deeply personal argument for the shaping influence of reading and writing on the lives of the individual and the group. In his prologue, Kazin offers a definition of criticism as “the ability to state preferences, to make choices on the basis of what is said in the only way available to that particular writer to say it.” Comparing himself with academic...
[The entire page is 522 words long]
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