Body and Soul - Softcover

Conroy, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 044021789X ISBN 13: 9780440217893

Publisher: Bantam Books, 1994

Synopsis

Claude Rawlings, a poverty-stricken young man, feels stymied by life, until he finds an old piano and embarks on a musical odyssey that takes him into a world of wealth, power, and fame

About this title

About the Author:

Frank Conroy was born in 1936 and graduated from Haverford College in 1958. He is currently teaching at the University of Iowa, where he is director of the prestigious Writer’s Workshop. Conroy has written an autobiography Stop-Time, published in 1967, and his collection of stories, Midair, was published in 1985. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, GQ, Harper’s Magazine, and Partisan Review. He divides his time between Iowa City and Nantucket.

From the Inside Flap:

ight of a basement apartment, six-year old Claude Rawlings sits at an old white piano, picking out the sounds he has heard on the radio and shutting out the reality of his lonely world.

The setting is 1940s New York, a city that is “long gone, replaced by another city of the same name.” Against a backdrop that pulses with sound and rhythm, Body & Soul brilliantly evokes the life of a child prodigy whose musical genius pulls him out of squalor and into the drawing rooms of the rich and a gilt-edged marriage.

But the same talent that transforms him also hurtles Claude into a lonely world of obsession and relentless ambition. From Carnegie Hall to the smoky jazz clubs of London, Body & Soul burns with a passion and truth--at once a riveting, compulsive read and a breathtaking glimpse into a boy’s heart and an artist’s soul.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 044021789X
• ISBN 13: 9780440217893
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback