Alfred Kazin, a prominent critic of American literature and culture since the 1930s, is best known for his ground-breaking study of modern American literature, On Native Grounds (1942), his ongoing criticism of contemporary American literature, and his three autobiographical works describing his Brooklyn childhood and his adult life as a writer-intellectual in New York City. Kazin belongs to that loosely knit group of writers and thinkers associated with Partisan Review, sometimes called the "New York Intellectuals," who got their start in the late 1930s and rose to national prominence in the 1940s and 1950s as literary-cultural critics with a special expertise in politics, particularly the politics of the anti-Stalinist left. Kazin, however, is something of an exception in this group in that while most of his fellow intellectuals looked to Europe for their literary and political material and standards, Kazin looked to America, particularly to the literature of America's...