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4.5
Next to Edmund Wilson, Alfred Kazin was perhaps the most important twentieth century literary critic. Both had a wider vision than most academics and urban intellectuals, one that included the natural world as well as the artificial one. And Kazin had a wider appreciation of American nature than Wilson, who tended to confine his interest to the northeastern landscapes with which, belonging to a family that went back to the colonial period, he identified. Coming from a second generation immigrant family, Kazin looked at the American landscape and its relationship to our classic literature, from Hawthorne to Hemingway, with fresh eyes. In the 1980s, he toured the country to research A Writer's America, which presents his view of the historical literature-landscape relationship in lively, amusing prose. Lavishly illustrated with historic paintings and photographs, this book is a unique link between our natural heritage and our cultural one.
