Passage III

HUMANITIES: This passage is adapted from the preface to On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature by Alfred Kazin (@1995 by Alfred Kazin).

I began On Native Grounds on a kitchen table in Brooklyn, 1938, and completed it in Long Island City, 1942, expecting a call from my draft board at any minute. The dates are essential to any understanding of the book, to its survival for over fifty years and its continued influence. There is no excitement for a writer like that of living in rebellious times. At least before World War II broke out, my work in progress was very much the product of and a response to the social crises of the 30s. The massive breakdown of the American economy in the depression was the greatest national crisis after the Civil War, and I lived in its very midst, tossed up and down in the stormy ocean of the times by the suffering of my unemployed working-class parents, the mass social protests all over the country, the triumph of Fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and the extremism in America itself of Communist and Fascist geologies in violent conflict.

What Walt Whitman wrote about the Civil War in "Drum-taps" could have been said of the '30s:

Long, too long America,

Traveling roads all even and peaceful you learn'd from joys and

prosperity only.

But now, ah now, to learn from crises of anguish, advancing grappling with direst fate and recoiling not.

And now to conceive and show to the world what your children enmasse really are....

A history of modern American prose literature begun in such a period and continued out of a sense of social crisis during the great global war against Fascism! The literary significance of this is that I believed in what essayist William Hazlitt called the "spirit of the age"—meaning that this age we were living in had a character all its own and could be related to other ages and periods, thus constituting a historical scene in which a period was known through its writers and its writers through their period.

Of all my books, On Native Grounds was the easiest to write. I felt what have never felt since 1945—that the age was wholly with me, that I was appealing to "the spirit of the age," that the writers as characters in my book were friends and the most encouraging people in the world to write about. I was writing literary history, a genre long abandoned by critics and now suspect (history can no longer be characterized and summed up as confidently as it was in the 30s and early 40s by the young man who wrote this book). This means that I saw connections everywhere between history and literature. I saw connections between the writers themselves as fellow-spirits and artists relating to the pressures of American life.

My subject was the emergence of the "modern" in an American literature obviously unsettled by relentless new forces in every sphere: social, intellectual, and religious. My perspective, so natural in the turbulent 30s, was based on a spirit of social protest shared with almost every writer in my book.

There was nothing strange or unexpected in 1938 about my being both critical of "the system" and crazy about the country. What drew me to the serious study of American literature within a historical context was the narrative it suggested on every hand. America from its beginnings as "our rising empire" (George Washington) embodied a purposeful form of historical movement, unprecedented on such a continental scale, that cried out to be written as a great story. In the background of the particular story I was writing was the sense, which was everywhere at the end of the nineteenth century, of a new age. What struck me from the first was the astonishment with which American writers confronted situations as new to themselves as to the Europeans who were often reading about America for the first time.

What gave me the confidence at twenty-three to begin a book like this? The age, the insurgency of the times, but above all On Native Grounds represents my personal discovery of America. The first native son in my immigrant family, brought up in a Brooklyn ghetto by parents whose harshly enclosed lives never gave them a chance even to learn English. I was crazy about the America I knew only through books. And it was such an idealistic America, defined by its purest spirits, from Audubon and Jefferson to Emerson and Thoreau, to the Lincoln who had saved the Union, to the great democrats of philosophy Jonn Dewey and William James, and to the Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Carl Sandburg who brought home the Middle West to me as the valley of democracy and the fountainhead of hope.