Kazin, Alfred

A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature with: Ephemera

ISBN: 0394571428
New York, NY, USA: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988. First American Edition. Hardcover. "But where is what I started for so long ago? | And why is it yet unfound?" (Walt Whitman, pg. 228). A Writer's America: Landscape in Literature is a work of literary criticism by Alfred Kazin (1915-1998), the influential American author & critic best known for his 1942 debut On Native Grounds. Kazin's central argument in A Writer's America is that the American landscape with its sheer scale, wildness & openness has been the defining preoccupation of the country's writers. Kazin traces how the physical environment shaped American literary imagination from the Puritans forward, reading nature not just as scenery but as the space where Americans worked out questions of God, self, nationhood & destiny. Important American writing icons discussed include Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau and the Transcendentalist sense of nature as spiritual text; Walt Whitman's expansive embrace of the continent; Herman Melville and the sea; the frontier and the West; and darker counter-visions in writers like Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and later William Faulkner, where the land carries menace, history, and loss rather than promise. Kazin also connects the writers to painters of the Hudson River School and luminist tradition, arguing that word and image were engaged in the same project of making sense of an overwhelming physical country. A Writer's America is heavily illustrated, featuring reproductions of American landscape paintings, photographs, and prints alongside the text. Third Mind Books has found & retained between pgs. 134-135 an editorial or teaching notes handwritten in charcoal black ink about Kazin from Laurence Goldstein printed on the verso side of a Xerox copy of a review of a book by Jaimy Gordon from the Michigan Quarterly Review. From the collection of Laurence Goldstein (1943-2023), poet, editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review, and professor in the University of Michigan Department of English Language and Literature. Hardcover in unclipped First Issue Dust Jacket (with $24.95 price printed at front flap, "10/88" at rear flap): First American Edition per copyright page, first printing though not explicated as such thereon. A most collectible book of literary criticism in one of its rarest contemporary forms with relevant association & distinguished provenance, enriched with editorial ephemera. Book in relatively very fine condition with no discernible flaws other one red remainder mark strike to fine edges of top text block near spine. Interior very fine with very mild age-toning mostly to fine edges of page leaves. Dust Jacket very fine with mild creasing to top of spine; very mild age-toning to top fine edge of front, back coves, spine & flaps. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #9141]

Price: $60.00