Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...kind young men dream about; six of his books, including two well-received novels (The Poorhouse Fair, and Rabbit, Run) have been published. A third novel, The Centaur, will be issued later this month; it is a complex attempt to combine as parallel themes reminiscence of small-town boyhood with Greek mythology. There is almost no critic who has not praised Updike's crystalline style, his mastery of the distilled phrase. Yet amid the praise there is a growing impatience. Novelist Stacton, who admires Updike's "sense of words," summed it up recently: "I wish he could find...
...Congressmen consider to be Mills's besetting flaw: an apparent insecurity that sometimes makes him overcautious. The flaw is all the more puzzling in that, far more than most men, Mills has escaped defeats and detours in life. He is that fortunate rarity, a man who has fulfilled his boyhood dreams...
...town, owner of a busy country store that sold everything from horehound drops to horse collars. (Mills's mother, 77, still helps run the store.) Later on, Ardra Mills acquired a cotton gin and an interest in the local bank. Wilbur worked in the store during his boyhood, but early in life he was struck with awed admiration of William A. Oldfield, the bouncy, genial Congressman from the district. In his travels around his constituency, Oldfield frequently visited Kensett and stopped at the Mills store. "I was talking about running for Congress by the time I was ten," Mills recently...
Such were the surroundings of Lampedusa's boyhood. As an adult, while the traditions and the estates of the aristocracy passed through their final decay, the author, who did not need to work, devoted himself to learning the world's literature...
...ordered that the friendly spiders which abounded in his studio should not be disturbed (the maids hid behind the coal pile the mop used for brushing down spiderwebs). He was a patient and humorous father; explaining the meaning of duty to his son, he would recall his own boyhood as a tailor's son. "I had to shell green peas and I loathed it. But I knew that it was part of my life. If I hadn't shelled the peas, my father would have had to, and he would not have been able to deliver on time...