For more than sixty years Alfred Kazin has been one of the most eloquent witnesses to the literary life of the mind in America. Writing Was Everything is a summation of that life, a story of coming of age as a writer and critic that is also a vibrant cultural drama teeming with such characters as Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell. A deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism that moves from New York in the 1930s to wartime England to the postwar South, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. In his encounters with books, Kazin shows us how great writing matters and how it involves us morally, socially, and personally on the deepest level. Whether reflecting on modernism, southern fiction, or black, Jewish, and New Yorker writing or reliving the work of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he gives a penetrating, moving account of literature observed and lived. In his life as a critic, Kazin personifies the lesson that living and writing are necessarily intimate. Writing Was Everything encapsulates the lively wit and authority of this timeless critic's unmistakable voice. It stands as clear testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind." Alfred Kazin is our grand old man of letters, supreme keeper of the now-flickering literary flame...Prolific, indefatigable, ambitious on a scale that seems quaint in this day of academic specialization, Mr. Kazin has never been one to bore his readers with detail. He prefers the sprawling canvas, the hard-to-categorize narrative that mingles scholarship and reminiscence, polemic and personal history...One of Mr. Kazin's great strengths as a critic is the sheer passion he brings to his task: from the beginning, his books have been hymns to the centrality of literature, its capacity, as he puts it in Writing Was Everything , to 'make the world shine...In the end, what of [the legacy of Mr. Kazin's generation] will survive? To my mind, the novels of Saul Bellow, a handful of Delmore Schwartz's poems and the urgent, rhapsodic prose of Alfred Kazin. (James Atlas New York Times Book Review ) [Kazin] takes up what it means to practice 'the curious business of being a critic,' which amounts to grappling with the meaning of life--his and in general--and its relationship to literature. In the course of it, he discusses the writers he has admired and offers sketches of some he has known. (Katherine A. Powers Boston Sunday Globe ) With his heart simultaneously bursting and broken, [Kazin] has had to ransack through books in search of what he loves but knows he cannot find--not small entertainments and pleasures but 'everything.' Never has a man turned to books with more ardor and hope! And, among the new books that I myself have read this year, his is the one I love the most. (Paul Berman The New Yorker ) This fabulous genre, memoir and criticism, this Monday morning quarterbacking on history and culture and literature, surely must be the Tiffany watch we allow our lifelong literary critics. The name-dropping, the constellations reconfigured, the slights on which a career is made or broken, could anything be more delicious?...Kazin distills, with grace and sophistication, the nuggets he has carried with him from the great works; from Proust, from Richard Wright, from Simone Weil. (Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times Book Review ) [Kazin's] concerns are those of our bewildered and bewildering times: shrinking hope, the indirection of society and loss of faith...An impressionistic, unashamedly subjective tour of the most important writers of this century, Kazin...writes engagingly and provocatively... Writing Was Everything ...[is] one man, a life-long writer and reader, and his views on what matters in literature. (Guy Lawson Toronto Globe and Mail ) [ Writing Was Everything is] satisfying in blending autobiography and literary reflection. Kazin tells his personal story by way to the books and authors that meant most to him...[There is] emotional power [in] Writing Was Everything . (Mark Krupnick Chicago Tribune ) Gives a splendid insight into the mind of this passionate New York intellectual...It is his power to communicate his enthusiasm for a life of reading that gives these lectures their distinction. (Anthony Curtis Financial Times ) Most impressive is Kazin's continuing ability, already evident more than half a century ago, to quickly and convincingly characterize an author and place him or her in the context of the times. His discussions of writers like George Orwell, Edmund Wilson and Flannery O'Connor, to name the most bold and remarkable, reminds us of what literary criticism was--and should be today. (Dave Wood Minneapo