Alfred Kazin

Author of numerous reviews, essays, and books on literature and on a variety of social, political, and religious issues, Alfred Kazin is considered one of the most influential writers and intellectuals of post-war America. His first and most successful volume of literary criticism, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (Reynal and Hitchcock, New York, 1942) provided an extensive analysis of the early American prose fiction. The volume was translated into Italian under the title La nuova terra. Storia della letteratura americana (transl. by Margherita Santi Farina, edited by Masolino d'Amico, Longanesi, Milan, 1952). 

In the 1940s and 1950s, Kazin reviewed the works of dozens of his contemporaries, both European and American, including many Italian writers and thinkers among which Ignazio Silone, Carlo Levi, Luigi Pirandello, Paolo Milano and Gaetano Salvemini. Staying true to his Jewish roots, Kazin showed great interest in the history of the Holocaust and in Primo Levi for whom he had boundless admiration, calling him "one of the most valuable writers of our time" (Healey, Italian Literature since 1900 in English Translation, p. 884). 

Kazin's first trip to Italy was in 1947. During the eight months he spent in Italy, Kazin visited Assisi (about which he wrote "I am so enchanted by Italy and feel so inferior to it, so lacking in the grace I see all around me"), Florence, where he visited the Villa I Tatti and met Leo Stein, and Rome, where he had the opportunity to meet in person with Bernard Berenson, Carlo Levi, and Ignazio Silone.

Also in 1947, Kazin attended the Salzburg Seminar and gave a series of lectures on American literature, an experience he repeated in 1951. The event was organized with the purpose of promoting American culture and institutions. It brought together students from Italy and from other European countries for lectures and discussions with leading American academics and thinkers. 

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