Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties. This item is unavailable.Younger Than That Now: A Shared Passage from the Sixties

A chronicle of love and friendship begins in 1969, when high school newspaper editor Jeff Durstewitz of Long Island, New York, and his fellow staffers wrote an obnoxious note to editor Ruth Williams of Yazoo City, Mississippi, which soon turned into a sustained relationship throughout the years. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

able dual memoir that explores an extraordinary friendship ... and illuminates a generation.

It began in 1969, when a group of bored Long Island high school reporters wrote, for a lark, an obnoxious note to Ruth Tuttle, the editor of a school paper in small-town Mississippi. The ringleader, Jeff Durstewitz, impulsively dropped the letter into a mailbox, never suspecting that within a few days he'd receive an electrifying response. In the following flurry of letters, genteelly Southern Ruth and brash New Yorker Jeff explored their feelings about God, race, sex, and life -- and an enduring friendship was begun.

Over the next thirty years, this long-distance bond sustained Ruth and Jeff through love affairs and heartbreak, social change and disillusionment, divorce and the loss of a cherished friend. As their letters chart their passage from youth to middle age, their memoir captures not just the hopes of an era yearning for revolution and the soul of a country on the brink of c