Word: boyhoods
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...whaler captain, he has a mean word for everybody. Composer Deems Taylor? "What a punk!" His Mississippi steamboat-captain grandfather, Charles Henry Ruggles? "A terrible old tyrant-he had to be captain of the ship all the time." His father Nathaniel? 'Drunk all the time." His boyhood hero, Actor Richard Mansfield? "A fine actor but a mean bastard," To this day, he has only one answer when asked about the state of American music: "I think Sun Treader is the greatest composition" And his reply to the obligatory question about his remarkable longevity is always the same: He thrives...
...system into which they are born." As for himself, Gill figures he escaped from personal imprisonment when he left San Angelo, Texas, where he was brought up. A hitch in the Marines and five years spent on architectural work in Texas taught him, he says, just how stifling his boyhood had been. Then one day he decided that he ought to change his whole life. "I was too fat," he remembers; so he went on a diet. "I also told myself I should stop drinking and smoking. Along with that, I decided I should do what I really wanted...
...genteel family in post-Civil War Kentucky. His mother, he recalls, "had been brought up, like all Southern girls of her class, to do nothing," and he himself was raised "in the shadow of the Lost Cause." Admits Krock: "I looked upon the Confederate veterans as my boyhood heroes." Thus, although he considers himself a "Democratic liberal," he has been increasingly horrified at "the men and events that have reshaped our political system for the worse in the name of a 'liberalism' both spurious of ancestry and destructive in practice...
Trying to preside over it all is Wolf Walker, a troubled escapee from a Hasidic Jewish boyhood. For him-head still throbbing with Talmudic commentary and heart still wrung by questions of moral choice-the academy is a refuge from his own perplexed humanity. Armed with tough talk ("Suicides are like children. You have to know when to ignore them"), he struggles to give academy inmates a fairer choice than they ever got in the real world. At the same time, he fights off board members who are chiefly interested in getting the would-be suicides to leave their money...
...writing, and assembles it in chronological order. The result unquestionably is the most exhaustive biography ever written about Crane-or likely to be written. Nothing is ignored: the details of his birth in 1871, the 14th child of a gentle Methodist minister in Newark, the fairly typical boyhood years in Port Jervis, N.Y., the erratic career as a reporter for New York City papers, and finally, his years as a correspondent covering the Greco-Turkish and Spanish-American wars...