Last Stands: Notes from Memory - Softcover

Masters, Hilary

Softcover

ISBN 10: 007040786X ISBN 13: 9780070407862

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 1983

Synopsis

An author creates a memorable and perceptive portrait of his father, poet Edgar Lee Masters, and the rest of his family

About this title

Review

"A family history that manages - through imagination as well as recollection and research - to connect and interweave the American past, present, and future. Though Masters is deeply concerned with the relationship of his family's history to his country's, he is even more deeply involved with attempting to search for answers to the mystery of identity, to speculate about what it is that brought him to where he is now. And he never loses sight of the essential truth that we can never know the past, that the most we can hope to do is reinvent it for whatever meaning it offers to the present. A luminous, consequential book." - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World; "The portraits are at once funny and sad but they are portraits in the round, of people understood and accepted, and in their strong individuality, a touch of universality. A model demonstration of the uses of memory." - The New Yorker; "An immensely artful book, which is to say that the care its author has taken with his arrangements ensures the illusions of truth." - Newsweek; "The novelist's willingness to reshape time for meaning guides this memoir; so does the photographer's ability to focus, frame and crop for impact. An elegant book." - Los Angeles Times"

About the Author

Hilary Masters grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the author of eight novels, two story collections, and a collection of essays. He's been a Fulbright lecturer to Finland and the recipient of Yaddo fellowships and an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His essays have been republished in Best American Essays and Anchor Best Essays, and his short fiction has been cited in Best American Short Stories and Pushcart. He is professor of English and creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Phillip Lopate is the author of four essay collections, two novels, and two poetry collections. He currently teaches at Hofstra University.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 1983
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 007040786X
• ISBN 13: 9780070407862
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1