SOURCE: "A Self-Made Man," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XLII, No. 15, October 5, 1995, p. 23.

[In the following review, Adams offers high praise for Kazin's body of work, including Writing Was Everything.]

Alfred Kazin's modest memoir, Writing Was Everything, marks its author's entry into his ninth decade. This, if ever, is a proper time to summarize and retrospect. (I remember the surprise with which I learned that my classmate and coeval at Columbia College, Thomas Merton, had written and published to acclaim his full life history, before I'd so much as started living my life, let alone written the history of it.) Kazin's essays, though originally delivered as the William E. Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard, are by no means so portentous as that. Rather, they are a casual and often ingratiating set of autobiographical reminiscences and critical reflections from the different periods...