Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. His literary reviews appeared in The New York Times, the New York Herald-Tribune, The New Republic and The New Yorker. His trilogy of memoirs, A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978), were all finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Early life He was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, New York City. His father, Charles Kazin, was a house-painter from Minsk. His sister, Pearl Kazin Bell (1922–2011) was also a writer and critic. She was an assistant literary editor at Harper's Bazaar as well as a regular fiction critic for The New Leader, Partisan Review and Commentary. In 1934, he got an early break reviewing books for The New Republic. He also graduated with an MA from Columbia University in 1938.

Career Kazin was deeply affected by his peers' subsequent disillusion with socialism and liberalism. Adam Kirsch writes in The New Republic that "having invested his romantic self-image in liberalism, Kazin perceived abandonment of liberalism by his peers as an attack on his identity".

In 1951, he wrote the acclaimed memoir A Walker in the City, where he details his childhood in the Jewish milieu of Brownsville in Brooklyn. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1952. The subsequent sequels, Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) and New York Jew (1978) were also finalists for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

He embedded in his published opinions knowledge of literary history, politics, and culture. In 1996 he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism, which carries a cash award of $100,000. As of 2014, the only other person to have won the award was George Steiner.

In 1963 he became a distinguished professor in the English Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He stayed at Stony Brook for ten years before taking up distinguished professor positions at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (1973–1978, 1979–1985).

Kazin's son from his second marriage is historian and Dissent co-editor Michael Kazin. Alfred Kazin married his third wife, the writer Ann Birstein, in 1952, and they divorced in 1982; their daughter is Cathrael Kazin.

Kazin married a fourth time, and is survived by his widow, the writer Judith Dunford.