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Alfred Kazin

Alfred Kazin Books

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“Brooklyn Heights itself is a window on the port. Here, where the perspective is fixed by the towers of Manhattan and the hills of New Jersey and Staten Island, the channels running between seem fingers of the world ocean. Here one can easily embrace the suggestion, which Whitman felt so easily, that the whole American world opens out from here, north and west.”

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Author:Alfred Kazin
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“Walking I am unbound, and find that precious unity of life and imagination, that silent outgoing self, which is so easy to loose, but which a high moments seems to start up again from the deepest rhythms of my own body. How often have I had this longing for an infinite walk - of going unimpeded, until the movement of my body as I walk fell into the flight of streets under my feet - until I in my body and the world in its skin of earth were blended into a single act of knowing.”

WorldSelfMomentsBodySeemsEarthEasyImaginationMy OwnWalksKnowingJourneyFeetStreetsMovementWalkingSkinsInfiniteLongingUnitySilentFlightRhythmWanderHikingTrekkingStrollingSaunteringOutgoingUnbound
Author:Alfred Kazin
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“What need had the businessman to scribble or philosophize when he dominated the imagination of his time and the frantic materialism that was his principle of existence had become the haunting central figure in contemporary life?”

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Book:On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature
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“Modern American literature was born in protest, born in rebellion, born out of the sense of loss and indirection which was imposed upon the new generations out of the realization that the old formal culture-the "New England idea"-could no longer serve.”

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Book:On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature
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“Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?”

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Book:On Native Grounds: An Interpretation Of Modern American Prose Literature
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“The conviction of tragedy that rises out of his [John Dos Passos's] work is the steady protest of a sensitive democratic conscience against the tyranny and the ugliness of society, against the failure of a complete human development under industrial capitalism.”

HumansSocietyDevelopmentConscienceCapitalismTragedyDemocraticConvictionTyrannySensitiveProtestSteadyUglinessHuman Development
Book:ON NATIVE GROUNDS An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature
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