Alfred Kazin (1915 – 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. He was born to Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn and earned his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York. He was deeply affected by his peers’ disillusionment with socialism and liberalism and began to write out of great passion – or disgust – for what he was reading and embedded his opinions in a deep knowledge of literary, political, and cultural history.
Kazin’s works include the books, The New York Jew (1978), A Writer’s America: Landscape in Literature (1988), A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (1996), and countless others. He also edited and/or co-edited famous works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work, The Works of Anne Frank, and Selected Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1996, he was awarded the first Truman Capote Lifetime Achievement Award in Literary Criticism. Kazin died in Manhattan on his 83rd birthday and is survived by his fourth wife, Judith Dunford.
