A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin

The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Kazin became the last 20th century American literary and social critic in a great tradition that began with Edmund Wilson. A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment is a collection of writings from Kazin's diaries, which he has kept from the 1930s to the present. From a sensitive observer who is never at a loss for the most striking words, this is an astute and resonant portrait of cultural life in the last half century.

In On Native Grounds, the classic work of literary criticism published in 1942, Alfred Kazin helped to define American literature and its relationship to the time and place from which it emerged. The intervening decades have not always been kind to the tradition of literary criticism that he helped create or the literature he helped define. "Where," he writes, "is the writer to be found who will have the inner certainty to see our life with the eyes of faith, and so make the world shine again?" This collection of journal entries follows Kazin's journey into dismay, if not despair, as well as his inward search for something that might provide a foundation for hope.