Tuesday, October 16, 2018

May 29, 1964

"[Ralph] Ellison came down for lunch, the Department-about-to-hire-you lunch, and talked very soundly and very impressively about the translation of American experience into authentic works of the imagination. . .

"Ralph is terribly impressive. With his beautiful light-Indian-Negro color, the Oklahoma accent, the scar just alongside of the right eye, and above all his sense of American experiences as something naturally flowing into and boiling up creatively in a literary mind of his kind of sensitivity, I find that I learn from him more of what I owe myself than I do from many writer-friends. This same evening, the Hoftstadters just back from Europe were over for dinner, full of self-satisfaction and purring with tales of the Mercedes and the grand tour. Whenever I am with the Hoftstadters, I feel in the air this self-consciously competitive ticking off of everything--academic accomplishment, literary accomplishment, motor-car acquisition."

~~ from Alfred Kazin's Journals, entry from May 29, 1964


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