About every twenty years, more or less, American intellectuals rediscover religion. And, about every thirty years, more or less, American intellectuals rediscover the Civil War. We are at present, I fear, in one of those periods of harmonic convergence, when American intellectuals have rediscovered both God and the Civil War at the same time. Famed critic Alfred Kazin’s latest book, God and the American Writer, is a prime example of what takes place when this epiphany happens to someone to whom these topics are not merely terra nova, but terra incognita.
God and the American Writer is an old-fashioned book of literary criticism. It consists of twelve “trenchant critical studies”—to quote the publicity material—and a prelude and afterword. The subjects range, in chronological order, from Hawthorne to Faulkner, with stops in between for Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Melville, Whitman, Lincoln, Dickinson, William James, Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and assorted incidental hangers-on. There is plenty of biographical detail, plenty of well-chosen quotation. There are no gendered readings, no multicultural perspectives, no playful deconstructions of text, no body parts strewn about the literary landscape. There are also no surprises. But for the occasional neologism and reference to events in the recent past—and the occasional autobiographical anecdote dispensed in the magisterial tone of a Grand Old Man—this collection could have been written in 1942, when Kazin published On Native Grounds, his first book of criticism.
God and the American Writeris an old-fashioned book of
