"Is it strange, then, that in a literature so concerned with realism and with personal liberation this refusal and impoverishment of the life of the spirit have always nourished the screamers, the eccentrics, the pseudo-Whitmans, the calculating terrorists?"
Alfred Kazin was an American writer and literary critic whose essays and reviews appeared in leading U.S. publications. He is especially known for memoirs and criticism focused on American and immigrant literary experience. He was born on June 5, 1915, and died on June 5, 1998.