First published in 1978, Mary Oppen's seminal Meaning a Life has
been largely unavailable for decades. Written in her sixties, her
first and only prose book recounts, with honesty, depth, and
conviction, her fiercely independent life-"a twentieth-century
American romance," as Yang describes it in the new introduction,
"of consciousness on the open road; a book of travel where the
autobiographer is not the usual singular self at the center of the
story but the union of two individuals." Oppen tells the story of
growing up with three brothers in the frontier towns of Kalispell,
Montana, and Grants Pass, Oregon, determined to escape the trap of
"a meaningless life with birth and death in a biological
repetition." That escape happens in the fall of 1926, when she
meets another student in her college poetry class, George Oppen.
She is expelled for breaking curfew, and from then on the two face
the world intertwined: living a life of conversation, hitchhiking
across the US, sailing from the Great Lakes to New York City,
meeting fellow poets and artists, starting a small press with
Zukofsky and Pound, traveling by horse and cart through France, and
fighting fascism through the Great Depression. Mary Oppen writes
movingly of both her inner life and external events, of the
inconsolable pain of suffering multiple stillbirths, of her husband
fighting on the front lines during WWII while she struggled to care
for their baby daughter, of fleeing to Mexico to avoid persecution
for their political activities. This expanded edition includes a
new section of prose and poetry that deepens Oppen's radiantly
incisive memoir with further memories, travels, and reflections.
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