American Writers.(Book Review)

Alfred Kazin's America, edited by Ted Solotaroff (HarperCollins; $29.95). The literary critic Alfred Kazin chose America as his subject, and his intellectual awakening is itself something of an American legend. As a young man during the Depression, in the "delicious isolation" of the New York Public Library, he immersed himself in Howells, Faulkner, and others, eventually producing "On Native Grounds," a landmark study of American realism and modernism in which he displayed the infallible nose for a writer's best work that distinguished his long career. Later, he turned his critical eye inward, producing three memoirs about his Jewish boyhood in Brownsville and his friendships with famous contemporaries. Kazin died in 1998, and Ted Solotaroff's selection of his work is a fitting tribute: a book that will be a starting point for further reading, both of Kazin and of the native writers to whom he devoted himself.

Hawthorne, by Brenda Wineapple (Knopf; $30). Nathaniel Hawthorne's ambition was such that he always considered himself a failure. A prude and a mama's boy, haunted by the fear that writing was not a manly profession, he was ashamed of his fame. Far from being the anti-Puritan that his work suggests, he was an irascible conservative, who believed that women shouldn't be writers, and who, during the Civil War, horrified his more enlightened peers by displaying equal contempt for North and South. After his death, critics grappled with "the paradox of Hawthorne," resorting to hydraulic metaphors for his genius: it was overwhelming; it was forced into channels. Wineapple's take is notable for its plain acceptance of Hawthorne's contradictions: a student of hypocrisy, he was a resolute Yankee who hated his patrimony.

Arthur Miller, by Martin Gottfried (Da Capo; $30). At the mid-century moment when psychological realism, moral seriousness, and progressive politics formed our dominant literary aesthetic, the Broadway success of "All My Sons" catapulted Miller to fame, not just as a playwright but as an exemplar: the intellectual as superstar, mighty enough to engage the country's conscience, sexy enough to make Marilyn Monroe his bride. Gottfried traces Miller's development from his family's devastation in the 1929 stock-market crash through his leftist indoctrination at the University of Michigan and his literary ascendancy and shows a man emotionally remote and professionally sanctimonious, who complained, for instance, that audiences were supposed to "think, not weep" at "Death of a Salesman." While Miller's own interest in psychology doubtless encourages such biographical scrutiny, the dutiful Ping-Ponging between life and writings unfortunately amplifies the sense of the playwright's self-involvement and mutes the sense of his ...