On Native Grounds

“With On Native Grounds [Kazin] takes his place in the first rank of American practitioners of the higher literary criticism” ( The New York Times ).   An important historian of American literature, Alfred Kazin delivers an exhaustive—yet accessible—analysis of modernist fiction from the tail end of the Victorian period to the beginning of WWII. America’s golden age—from 1890 to 1940—included the work of Howells, Wharton, Lewis, Cather, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Their struggle fo