Volume 5, Number 10 · December 23, 1965
Kazin in the Thirties
By John Gross
Starting Out in the Thirties
by Alfred Kazin
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 166 pp., $4.95
With Starting Out in the Thirties Alfred Kazin reverts to the reminiscent vein of A Walker in the City, which means that he is back in his best form. The new book is inevitably somewhat cooler and less intimate in tone, since it deals with the world of public conflicts and adult responsibilities. The warm cocoon of childhood has been broken. In a central passage the twenty-year-old Kazin takes Otis Ferguson of The New Republic back to Brownsville for dinner with his family. To his dismay, Ferguson refused to find anything exotic or out of the ordinary about the experience. A trivial episode in itself, it was evidently an important landmark for the author on the road which we all have to travel, of learning that we are less unique than we like to think. And as the sense of uniqueness diminishes, so does the sense of magic with which Mr. Kazin invested the city streets in his earlier memoir.
Review, 1853 words
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