SOURCE: "Alfred Kazin: An American Journey," in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 244, No. 44, October 27, 1997, pp. 47-8.

[In the following essay, Schuessler surveys Kazin's life and works, and includes commentary from the author.]

Few writers in the annuals of American letters have lived so public a private life as Alfred Kazin. In his classic 1951 memoir, Walker in the City, Kazin drew an unforgettably vivid portrait of the literary critic as a young man in the working-class Jewish enclave of Brownsville, Brooklyn, walking and reading his way back to the old America of the 19th century, "that fork in the road where all American lives cross," even as he catalogued the sights, smells and sounds of an immigrant world that was itself soon to vanish.

Two subsequent volumes of autobiography, Starting Out in the Thirties (1962) and New York Jew (1978), followed the native son out into the larger world. There was Kazin's immersion...