Alfred Kazin was an American writer and critic whose work spanned the arts for more than half a century. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in literature in 1978. Born in Brooklyn, New York City, Kazin studied philosophy and literature at Harvard. He was a newspaper reporter before joining the staff of The New Yorker magazine in 1950, where he was highly influential in bringing modern fiction and contemporary poetry to a wider audience through his reviews and interviews
He is most famous for his essays on the writers and artists of his time: Hemingway, Picasso, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Maugham, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Henry James, Steinbeck, and Nathanael West.
The writer writes in order to teach himself, to understand himself, to satisfy himself; the publishing of his ideas, though it brings gratification, is a curious anticlimax.Alfred Kazin
One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.Alfred Kazin
