As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: 109 (Nonpareil Books) - Softcover

Lee, Laurie

4.22

7,562 ratings by Goodreads

9781567923926: As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning: 109 (Nonpareil Books)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1567923925 ISBN 13: 9781567923926

Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher Inc, 2011

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"I was nineteen years old, still soft at the edges, but with a confident belief in good fortune. I carried a small rolled-up tent, a violin in a blanket, a change of clothes, a tin of treacle biscuits, and some cheese. I was excited, vain-glorious, know�ing I had far to go; but not, as yet, how far."

Despite this romantic and optimistic opening, what Lee finds is the most primitive and feudal country in Europe, a peninsula untouched by the modern world, a land of labor without dignity, a church devoid of compassion, and a country ripe for revolutionary change.

There is humor, love, and adolescent awakening, but beneath is a foreboding sense of a savage future, a premonition that a war will come. For Lee, 1936 was the end of innocence, when "it was being learned again that men needed more than courage, anger, slogans, convictions, or even a just cause when they went to war." Thus Lee becomes entangled in the passionate, violent, and bloody struggle that was the Spanish Civil War.

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Review:

A beautiful piece of writing ( Observer)

The vivid sensitive, irresistibly readable story of what happened after he left home ( Daily Mail)

A poet's book ( Sunday Times)

He writes like an angel and conveys the pride and vitality of the humblest Spanish life with unfailing sharpness, zest and humour ( Sunday Times)

There's a formidable, instant charm in the writing that genuinely makes it difficult to put the book down ( New Statesman)

About the Author:

Laurie Lee has written some of the best-loved travel books in the English language. Born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, in 1914, he was educated at Slad village school and Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War. He later returned by crossing the Pyrenees, as he recounted in A Moment of War. In 1950 he married Catherine Polge and they had one daughter.

Laurie Lee published four collections of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955) and Pocket Poems (1960). His other works include The Voyage of Magellan (1948), a verse play for radio; A Rose for Winter (1955), which records his travels in Andalusia; The Firstborn (1964); I Can't Stay Long (1975), a collection of his occasional writing; and Two Women (1983). He also wrote three bestselling volumes of autobiography: Cider with Rosie (1959), which has sold over six million copies worldwide, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969) and A Moment of War (1991), which are also published by Penguin in a single volume entitled Red Sky at Sunrise (1992). He died in May 1997.

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