The Lee Shore - Softcover

Collins, Loyd

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0595331610 ISBN 13: 9780595331611

Publisher: iUniverse, 2004

Synopsis

It is a cherished fictional device to build a story around the discovery of a previously unpublished text. The stratagem is used by Henry James in The Aspern Papers. A.S. Byatt's Booker-Prize winning novel, Possession: A Romance, is also built this way. The Lee Shore is not an invention, but an actual flesh-and-blood manuscript. I only know about the book, because its author, Loyd "Pete" Collins, was a colleague and a close friend of my father, John Cheever. In 1935 Collins published a well-thought-of novel titled Call Me Ishmael. He then stopped publishing books, but he didn't stop writing. He worked for 30 years on The Lee Shore, and was fiddling with the manuscript almost until he died in 1966. Loyd's widow, Lib Logan Collins, kept the pages in a bank vault for 35 years. Her desire to see the book out before her own death prompted two of Loyd's nephews to produce a typescript. Here it is then, a first-class story, but also an artifact. The Lee Shore hails from the time before the invention of memoir, but reads with the force of living history. The romance begins in upstate New York when everybody smoked, and the streams were thronged with gigantic trout. -Benjamin CheeverMay, 2004

About this title

About the Author

Loyd ?Pete? Collins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1907. His family moved to White Plains, New York where he grew up. After briefly attending Brown University, he served in the merchant marine as an able bodied seaman. He desired to write and spent several seasons at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. His first book, Call Me Ishmael, was published in 1935 by Dodd Mead. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Army serving on transport ships in the North Atlantic. At the end of the war, he returned to civilian life working in the Veterans Administration and then private firms in New York City. During this period he continued to write The Lee Shore until his death in 1966.

Edition details

• Publisher: iUniverse
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0595331610
• ISBN 13: 9780595331611
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312