This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
AMERICAN BOOMER captures the humorous side of coming of age during the late 1950's. Enjoy many laughs as a young man tries to stay one step ahead of his parents, teachers, and the law, only to end up two or three steps behind. When the mysteries of religion, sex, and the world around him are rationalized within an immature mind and a wild imagination. American Boomer is a fun read meant to take you back to when the world moved at a much slower pace, cause you to smile often, and on occasion, make you laugh out loud.
Acclaimed writers, family, friends, and more pay homage to the celebrated Southern author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini. New York Times–bestselling writer Pat Conroy (1945–2016) inspired a worldwide legion of devoted fans, but none are more loyal to him and more committed to sustaining his literary legacy than the many writers he nurtured over the course of his fifty-year career. In sharing their stories of Conroy, his fellow writers honor his memory and advance our shared understanding of his lasting impact on literary life in and well beyond the American South. Conroy’s fellowship drew from all walks of life. His relationships were complicated, and people and places he thought he’d left behind often circled back to him at crucial moments. The pantheon of contributors includes Rick Bragg, Kathleen Parker, Barbra Streisand, Janis Ian, Anthony Grooms, Mary Hood, Nikky Finney, Nathalie Dupree and Cynthia Graubart, Ron Rash, Sandra Brown, and Mary Alice Monroe; Conroy biographers Katherine Clark and Catherine Seltzer; his longtime friends; Pat’s students Sallie Ann Robinson and Valerie Sayers; members of the Conroy family; and many more. Each author in this collection shares a slightly different view of Conroy. Through their voices, a multifaceted portrait of him comes to life and sheds new light on who he was. Loosely following Conroy’s own chronology, the essays herewith wind through his river of a story, stopping at important ports of call. Cities he called home and longed to visit, along with each book he birthed, become characters that are as equally important as the people he touched along the way.
The 21 poems in this collection were influenced by the work of many, including Neruda and Tagore, the nature poems of Galway Kinnell and Jim Harrison, and the modernist poets Hart Crane, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. It is perhaps Williams most of all whose imagist aesthetic infuses the poems. I've always liked the Zenlike attention he gives to the real, ordinary things of the world, so that in essence, they become extraordinary, a part of the reader's imagination. The poems can be divided up thematically into Cape Cod poems, fishing poems, New England nature poems, and spiritual pieces. Most of them came quite spontaneously and I let the words arrange themselves on the white tundra of my notebook pages with little thought of form; later, I tried to find the internal music, sense, and rhythm in each, adhering to Williams' dictum that a poem is a "little universe." In a sense each is an unfinished fragment, not wholeness itself but a search for wholeness and form. The first story, "Tracks of the Beleaguered" emerged after a two or three year gestation period not unusual for my process. I had been wanting to write a Vermont story for some time, one that would include a veteran of World War II tracking a wounded whitetail deer high up a mountain. I wanted the buck to embody the soul of the Green Mountains wild, primordial unchanged by technology and industry. Elisha represents the wounded modern exile, seeking a higher and more profound sense of identity after the dehumanizing brutality of the Pacific island fighting. I was reading Joseph Campbell's Primitive Mythology around the same time, and came upon a passage about the Buriat of Siberia and how with shamans there is usually a summons, a calling, which begins with a crisis and a dream of being broken apart physically, the discovery of an extra bone, followed by an interfusion of beingness. In a sense, Elisha and the buck become one, seeking sanctuary from the senseless violence and appearance-driven industrialized world. "Billie Holiday at the Atlantic House" is less esoteric and has its origins in trips to Provincetown where I frequently go to write, and where the actual Atlantic House exists on Masonic Street. Billie Holiday really did perform two separate engagements there. This one lived in my imagination for a year or so as well, percolating until all of the elements coalesced and resonated. I liked the idea of having Lucas be a Portuguese fisherman who listened and empathized with the blues and Jazz singer; I liked the innocence and naiveté of the storyline. To create a fictive Holiday, I listened to the Verve recordings I own, and went online to listen to rare interviews with her. Like Elisha in the first story, Lucas is somewhat out of step with society, and instead lives a vivid and intense inner life. As in the Vermont story and poems, the natural world predominates, always there for sanctuary, solitude, and transcendent experience. These thematic strands continue in the novella Whoever We May Be At Last whose title comes from The Ninth Duino Elegy by Rilke. The germ of the story came in a dream I had two years ago, and I spent a summer writing the first draft, watching it take on a life of its own. I wanted the setting to be a relatively small rivertown in Connecticut with a history of industry. I liked the idea of the story being told through five narrators, each having a connection to the central figure, Ian, who's about to enlist in the Marines and fight in Afghanistan. It's difficult for me to talk about this one, since it's more visceral than anything I've written before. I'll let the reader decide on interpretations. In some respects it's about the nature of sacrifice, the portrayal of a modern American town coming to terms with loss. Artistically, it seems to represent a living process of the imagination, of trying to piece together a semblance of the truth, and not so much a
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.