SOURCE: "The Eye and I," in National Review, Vol. XLIX, No. 23, December 8, 1997, pp. 50-7.

[Hart is an American educator, editor, and critic. In the following review, he offers a mixed assessment of God and the American Writer.]

Let us begin by praising Alfred Kazin. Now in his eighties, he has lived long with books, and literature matters greatly to him. All that he has written since On Native Ground (1942) testifies to that. Today, if you drop in on an English-literature class, you are likely to hear a lecture on kinky sex, amateur epistemology, Marxism, racial oppression, the Third World, or the atom bomb. What a relief to turn to Mr. Kazin.

In the present volume, he has chapters on a dozen American writers who matter: Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Frost, Faulkner—and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who matters historically. He...