SOURCE: "American Apostle," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLV, No. 5, March 26, 1998, pp. 25-8.

[In the following review, Stone examines God and the American Writer, and offers a laudatory assessment of the volume as well as of Kazin's role as an "Apostle" of American letters.]

1.

During the 1997 Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto, Alfred Kazin delivered a talk in a theater at a sumptuous lakeside shopping center on the role of religion in American letters. The lecture was drawn substantially from his introduction to the volume under review.

As Mr. Kazin was concluding his remarks on American writers and their uneasy relations with the numinous, a listener in the row behind me, whom I knew to be Canadian, remarked with bitter humor to his companion: "Why do they have this thing about themselves and God?"

At that point the Holy Spirit descended upon me and I was moved...