In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating grey area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts, and whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story - while also telling us true.

For his keen social insight, glib sophistication, and breathtaking lyricism, F. Scott Fitzgerald stands as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. His biographers all note the importance of his boyhood in St. Paul, where, as he put it, he lived in "a house below the average on a street above the average." Fitzgerald's sensitivity about wealth and position?later made evident in such classics as The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night--was bred of his St. Paul family and associations. F. Scott Fitzgerald's St. Paul is a city of winter dreams and ice palaces, lakeside parties and neighborhood hijinks. These are stories of ambition and young love, insecurity and awkwardness, where a poor boy with energy and intelligence can break into the upper classes and become a glittering success. This selection brings together the best of Fitzgerald's St. Paul stories?some virtually unknown, others classics of short fiction. Patricia Hampl's incisive introduction traces the trajectory of Fitzgerald's blazing celebrity and its connections to his life in the city that gave him his best material. Headnotes by Dave Page provide specific ties between the stories and Fitzgerald's life in St. Paul. "Fitzgerald is a presence in St. Paul, a ghost who patrols his old neighborhood and keeps talking to us. He sits on Mrs. Porterfield's porch on Summit Avenue, smoking and talking about writing, and it is always that gorgeous summer just before he finished the book, hit it big, went to New York, married the girl. This lovely book sets out our claim on him. We have no Fitzgerald museum in St. Paul, no boyhood home restored--the family lived in apartments--but this book is the only monument he needs, his own stories, with historical notes, and Patricia Hampl's graceful shining essay for absolution, and Zelda's benediction." -- Garrison Keillor "These are wonderful stories, including several of the greatest Fitzgerald ever wrote. Anyone interested in Fitzgerald or the importance of place in fiction will want to read this book. And anyone who does will find it a delight." -- Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald "In one of the ironies of fate of which life is so fond, the literary world knows the biography and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald better than it knows the particulars of the city where he was born. Fitzgerald loved, hated, and was obsessed by St. Paul, and in her brilliant introduction to these stories, Patricia Hampl shows us why. These stories and this wonderfully informative introduction give St. Paul a local habitation and a name, and they place Fitzgerald's ambitions and gifts in a cultural context too often ignored or forgotten." -- Charles Baxter, author of Saul and Patsy

In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions, reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember " a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself."

"A religious cliff-hanger--intimate, compelling, hard to put down."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Eager to shake off the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing, Patricia Hample seeks the "old world" of Catholicism. On her pilgrimage she meets others seekers--crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan friars and nuns, and the seekers that fill every charter flight. Inevitably, too, she finds the "old world" right at home, in the very past she had tried to escape. But what she is looking for confronts her, finally, on a rereat at a monastery near the Lost Coast of northern California in the still, virgin moments of silent prayer....

Just out of college, Patricia Hampl was mesmerized by a Matisse painting in the Art Institute of Chicago: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl, a Moroccan screen behind her. In Blue Arabesque, Hampl explores the allure of this lounging woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the rush of the modern era. Hampl's meditation takes us to the Cote d'Azur and to North Africa, from cloister to harem, pondering figures as diverse as Eugene Delacroix, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Katherine Mansfield. Returning always to Matisse's portraits of languid women, she discovers they were not decorative indulgences but something much more. Moving with the life force that Matisse sought in his work, Blue Arabesque is Hampl's dazzling and critically acclaimed tour de force.

When Patricia Hampl's first book of poems, Woman Before an Aquarium, appeared in 1978, Choice called it "a generous . . . first collection," and Virginia Quarterly Review characterized her work as "a poetry of accumulated details, strikingly presented."
Now, after the success of her brilliant prose memoir, A Romantic Education, which won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, Hampl has taken her poetry a step further in her new collection, Resort. The classical themes of beauty and love, loss and memory have always formed the core of Hampl's work. Here, they are treated in a series of shorter poems and then gathered powerfully into the long title poem of the collection. Set in a small, tumbledown cabin on the North Shore of Lake Superior, Resort follows the season of summer as Hampl explores a period of solitude following a loss, employing as a touchstone the image of the wild rose as it blooms and withers. In essence a poem about healing oneself through paying attention to the world outside, Resort has been called by poet Sandra McPherson "major, richly entangled, ebullient . . . all of a sudden my favorite long poem."

During the long farewell of her mother's dying, Patricia Hampl revisits her midwestern girlhood.Daughter of a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entree to St. Paul society, and a distrustful Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a tale, Hampl remained, primarily and passionately, a daughter well into adulthood. She traces the arc of faithfulness and struggle that comes with that role--from the postwar years past the turbulent sixties. At the heart of The Florist's Daughter is the humble passion of people who struggled out of the Depression into a better chance, not only for themselves but for the common good.Widely recognized as one of our most masterly memoirists, Patricia Hampl has written an extraordinary memoir that is her most intimate, yet most universal, work to date.This transporting work will resonate with readers of Francine du Plessix Gray's Them: A Memoir of Parents and JeannetteWall's The Glass Castle.