pFor more than sixty years Alfred Kazin has been one of the most eloquent witnesses to the literary life of the mind in America. iWriting Was Everythingi is a summation of that life, a story of coming of age as a writer and critic that is also a vibrant cultural drama teeming with such characters as Hart Crane and Allen Ginsberg, Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor, Hannah Arendt and Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell.ppA deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism that moves from New York in the 1930s to wartime England to the postwar South, iWriting Was Everythingi emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. In his encounters with books, Kazin shows us how great writing matters and how it involves us morally, socially, and personally on the deepest level. Whether reflecting on modernism, southern fiction, or black, Jewish, and New Yorker writing or reliving the work of Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever, he giv