During that time in adulthood when one does so much for the first time, he had a romance with another artist/intellectual, and describes in New York Jew, (1978) their Greenwich Village romance:
Mary Ellen was "a collector of intellectuals...intoxicated by ...[a] penniless addiction to every "revelation" that turned up...[All her affairs] were provisional."
...I sensed in Mary Ellen not merely a woman I loved but a dark punishing wisdom about a world in which everything had fallen to pieces....
[She at first had been to Kazin a ] "sense of amazement... in that dark little room in the basement amid her art magazine reproductions of Roualt Christs, her cats, the milk bottles on the window sill, the ever lasting smell of plaster of paris in the bathroom..The [basement] room was Mary Ellen's work of art. [The space]....where she had hardly room to turn around in under the falling heaps of books, the everlasting turn and scatter of her cats, she had somehow made her life....There was all the voluptuousness I had always dreamed of, when the cats came to bed with us and she grinned with delight....
When they met he was already the author of On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (1942). His later books would include:
Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer (1973), and An American Procession: The Major American Writers from 1830 to 1930—The Crucial Century (1984).
In his editing of certain writers:
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work
The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, (co-edited)
and Emerson: A Modern Anthology, (co-edited)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Man and His Work
The Stature of Theodore Dreiser, (co-edited)
and Emerson: A Modern Anthology, (co-edited)
Al;fred Kazin told us who we were. And Encyclopedia Britannica told us who Kazin was.
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