Although he’s long been a fixture in America’s literary pantheon, Alfred Kazin still finds his hometown madeleine in the Brooklyn Bridge

I’M DEEP, DEEP INTO LINCOLN RIGHT NOW,” The literary critic Alfred Kazin announces as he takes a break from writing his latest book and greets me in his sun-drenched Upper West Side apartment. “You’ll have to forgive me if I blather on about him.” Since Kazin’s blather is far more interesting than most people’s studied discourse, I happily settle in for the ride. “Lincoln really was the American Jesus, and there was something almost God-given about the fact that he became president at the very moment when the country so desperately needed a Christ-like figure. He was assassinated on Good Friday, and Easter Sunday was a moment of almost unspeakable drama-I can virtually feel it now,” Kazin says. “Here I am, a 20th-century Jew from Brownsville, Brooklyn, but when I read Lincoln or Melville or Whitman, I am completely at home.”

The quest to find a home is the leitmotiv of Kazin’s autobiographical writings, from his first memoir, the evocative A Walker in the City in 1951, through three sequels including A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment (Harper Collins), which comes out this month. Since bursting onto the scene in 1942 at age 27 with his first book, On Native Grounds, a study of prose writing in post-Civil War America, Kazin has devoted his career to exploring our national grain. Now nearly 81 years old and in frail health, he is working on his 13th book, The Almighty Has His Own Purposes, a study of religion and American literature.

Of the famous New York intellectuals who gathered around journals like the Partisan Review from the early ’40s to the late ’50s, Kazin most subtly balanced the concerns of literature and society. New York life and American literature have been the cardinal points on his aesthetic compass. In a lifetime spent here, he’s never lost touch with New York’s sense of strangeness, its brutal urban-ness. For him, the city mirrored his own wide-ranging intellectual journey. “Every time I go ‘home’ on a Friday night to Brownsville, it all feels like a foreign country,” he mused in his diary in the 1940s. “Only the bodies are in America. Their inner lives are still in the caverns of Russian memory and grief.” Reading Kazin’s beautifully crafted meditations, one is struck by his longing for a place to call his own, an emotion that suffuses the journals with an intimacy rarely seen in other fine literature: “In the center of the center,” he wrote as a newlywed, “one room and a kitchen, 50 a month, we had our love.”

It makes sense that a writer who has spent much of his life straddling the worlds of Brownsville and Manhattan returns to the image of the mighty Brooklyn Bridge again and again. “The downtown street dense with traffic bound for the Brooklyn Bridge on a winter’s day are lined with churches, banks, courts,” begins a 1938 entry. Kazin gets up to show me a picture of the colossal structure, whose surrounding factories and shops make it look more like a relic of the 19th century than like a gateway to the 20th.

“Although I must have walked across it a million times, it wasn’t until 1946, when Harper’s Bazaar asked me for a personal essay to accompany Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photos of the Brooklyn Bridge, that I really learned how to look at it,” Kazin recalls, still awestruck.” ‘It breathes! See how it breathes,’ he said to me. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized the amazing poetry of the bridge, the rhythm of it. The way the central promenade sways to the motion of the traffic.

“Much to my surprise, Cartier-Bresson was as charmed by the decrepitude of old New York as I was. We got on so well that we thought about doing a book about le tout New York,” Kazin says. The writer and the photographer still keep in touch, sharing the occasional meal in Paris or New York. But they never did do their book. “It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway,” Kazin says wistfully. “Paris is really his world, and New York is mine.”