An American Confession

 

"This book offers an interpretation of some major figures in American writing during the crucial century that began in the 1830s when Ralph Waldo Emerson left the church and founded a national literature on the basis of a religious revolution."

From the moment I read that opening sentence in the mid-1980s, I was both hooked and stunned. Before encountering this book (tossed carelessly upon a friend's coffee table) I had never even heard of this Alfred Kazin.

He wrote with the authority one acquires through deep acquaintance with the lives and thoughts of his "characters": the "major" American writers of the "crucial century" were "his people" in a way that few before him or since could claim. 

Influence anxiety seized me as I read the book, and it is only recently that I have allowed myself to re-read and properly honor this most accomplished critic and ardent lover of the American literary canon.