Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazins writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson and Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. It is fair to say that in his books, essays, and reviews, Kazin succeeded Edmund Wilson as the secretary of American letters, the one who kept closest track of its proceedings, its history, its symbiotic relationship with American society, and its relations with other Western literatures. He did so out of a particularly passionate concern for the significance and well-being of our literary heritage. The America that was mostly a political and cultural position-taking for his fellow New York intellectuals was for Kazin a lifelong possession and a complex fate. His working title for his final book, God and the American Writer, which dealt mostly with nineteenth-century authors, was "Absent Friends."At the same time this son of immigrant Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he typically put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." To indicate the development of this charged point of view, Ted Solotaroff has selected material from Kazins three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. These excerpts also provide the pleasure of his sharply etched portraits of the Brownsville, Greenwich Village, Upper West Side, and Cape Cod litera