Pack my Bag: A Self-Portrait (Twentieth Century Classics) - Softcover

Green, Henry; Yorke, Sebastian

3.38

113 ratings by Goodreads

9780140187939: Pack my Bag: A Self-Portrait (Twentieth Century Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140187936 ISBN 13: 9780140187939

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 1994

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In 1938 Henry Green, then thirty-three, dreaded the coming war and decided to "put down what comes to mind before one is killed." Published in England in 1940, Pack My Bag has heretofore not appeared in the U.S. When he wrote it, Green had already published three of his nine novels and his style - "a gathering web of insinuations" - was fully developed.
Pack My Bag is a marvelously quirky, clear-eyed memoir; a mother who shot at mangle wurzels on the lawn; the stately home packed with wounded soldiers of World War I; the miseries of Eton, oddities of Oxford, and work in the family factory - the making of a brilliantly original novelist. "We have inherited the greatest orchestra, the English language, to conduct," Green once wrote. "The means are there; things are going on in life all the time around us." His use of language and his account of things that went on in his life inform this delightful and idiosyncratic autobiography.

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Review:

"To read Green is to be profoundly challenged and empowered, drawn into a community of feeling, speech, and thought. It's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire who leads you faultlessly on."

About the Author:

Henry Green (1905-1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and went on to become the managing director of his family's engineering business, writing nine novels in his spare time. Anthony Burgess found his books "as solid and glittering as gems." He also wrote an astonishing memoir, Pack My Bag, published by New Directions.

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