He loved books and spent most of his time sitting on the fire escape of the tenement reading

It's the birthday of one of the great men of letters of the 20th century, Alfred Kazin, born in Brooklyn (1915). He grew up in the Brownsville section, the poor Jewish immigrant sector of Brooklyn. He said, "We were the children of the immigrants who had camped at the city's back door ... a place that measured all success by our skill in getting away from it."He loved books and spent most of his time sitting on the fire escape of the tenement reading whatever he could get his hands on. In 1934, he was a senior in college when he read a book review in The New York Times that made him so angry, he got off the subway, went to the Times office, and complained in person to the editor, who was impressed and got Kazin a job writing freelance book reviews. He studied literature at Columbia and started writing a historical survey of American literature from 1880 up to the 1930s. The result was his book On Native Grounds, which covered American literature from Dreiser and Stephen Crane to Edith Wharton and William Faulkner. It became one of the most celebrated works of literary criticism of the decade.

When asked why he'd spent so much of his life working as a critic, Kazin said: "I am dissatisfied, profoundly so, with the world as it is. But I would be dissatisfied with any world. And I'd hate to lose my dissatisfaction." more