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Literary Imagination Advance Access published online on March 20, 2008
Literary Imagination, doi:10.1093/litimag/imn012
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Believing Was Everything

Clark Davis

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Richard M. Cook, Alfred Kazin: A Biography. Yale University Press, 2007. 452 pages.

A popular story of the last few decades has been the tale of the vanishing intellectual—the "public" intellectual, generally, though it isn't hard to hear in the plaintiveness a fear that something environmental has occurred, as though a shift in climate had eliminated the entire range of a bellwether species. "The frogs are disappearing!" as they say of the sensitive amphibians. Something in the air seeps through the permeable skin—a portent. The reiterations of the narrative—is it a ghost story or a murder mystery?—have a ritual quality. Things are buried, spoken over. In this case categories: "public," to be sure, since who knows what that means anymore?; and "Intellectual," the capitalized, grand but tottering word whose marriage to the first had always been something of a mesalliance. In more recent days, the "reader" too (another mysterious . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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