SOURCE: "He Heard America Singing," in New York Times Book Review, July 19, 1998, p. 31.

[Wilentz is an American educator and critic; he is the Drayton-Stockton Professor of History and director of the American studies program at Princeton University. In the following essay, he examines Kazin's life and work, applauding the author's accomplishments as a writer and historian.]

As a boy in Brooklyn in the 1920's, Alfred Kazin devoured novels, poetry, travelers' accounts and, most of all, books about American history, which he would later call "the automatic part of all my reading." The present, Kazin remembered in A Walker in the City, was mean, but "the past, the past was great: anything American, old, lazed, touched with dusk at the end of the 19th century, till smoldering with the fires lit by the Industrial Revolution, immediately set my mind dancing." Inside is school's assembly hall, a photographic portrait of...