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."

When he discovers that his father worked on missiles for a defense contractor, Jeff Porter is inspired to revisit America's atomic past and our fallen heroes, in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The result, ""Oppenheimer Is Watching Me"", takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, Porter traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation. All the figures in this masterful work are caught in a web of coincidences and paranoias, the chapters strewn with the icons of American material culture of a bygone era - vintage Pontiacs, Fizzie sodas, Geiger counters, latex girdles, and, of course, Fat Man and Little Boy. Readers also encounter noteworthy figures from the era, including Francis Gary Powers, whose U2 spy plane was shot out from under him in the skies over the Soviet Union, and Fidel Castro, whom the CIA plotted to kill or, at least, strip of his beard. Seamlessly weaving historical events played out on a grand stage with day-to-day activities of childhood, ""Oppenheimer Is Watching Me"" is a heady mix of personal memoir and cold war history.

"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.

ORIGINALLY published in the June 11, 1984, "New Yorker, this lengthy essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of our national life. With the same iconoclastic spirit and multi-layered prose that he interwove in his classic "Within the Context of No Context, George Trow tells the story of upstate New York's Black Rock Forest--a thirty-eight-hundred-acre site overlooking the Hudson River--through the lives of the men who were connected to it and through the larger histories of Harvard University, US. conservation policies, and physics and biology. The men: banker James Stillman; his son, Ernest Stillman, a medical doctor who inherited the land that would become the Black Rock Forest in 1928 and who wanted to make it healthy and useful; the legendary Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief forester of the U.S. in 1898; and Richard Thornton Fisher, for many years the head of the Harvard Forest and the man who suggested to Ernest Stillman that he turn his inherited land into another demonstration forest. Harvard University: a more financially focused, less collegial environment than the one that had accepted the gift of the forest in 1949, now looking to shed responsibility for the forest without shedding the money its sale would bring. The challenge: how to manage, "how to value, a wilderness area of great biological diversity. In his brilliantly elastic fashion, Trow maneuvers images, symbols, ambiguities, ethics, journalistic wordplay, advertising tricks, and corporate doublespeak to create an intensely perceptive analysis of the cultural, political, and scientific communities. His richly developed story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale thatbears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life. A publisher's note reveals the fate of the forest.

Originally published in 1956, "The Great Chain of Life" brings a humanist's keen eye and ear to one of the great questions of the ages: "What am I?" Originally a scholar of literature and theater, toward the end of his career Joseph Wood Krutch turned to the study of the natural world. Bringing his keen intellect to bear on the places around him, Krutch crafted some of the most memorable and important works of nature writing extant.
Whether anticipating the arguments of biologists who now ascribe high levels of cognition to the so-called lower animals, recognizing the importance of nature for a well-lived life, or seeing nature as an elaborately interconnected, interdependent network, Krutch's seminal work contains lessons just as resonant today as they were when the book was first written.
Lavishly illustrated with thirteen beautiful woodcuts by Paul Landacre, an all-but-lost yet important Los Angeles artist whom Rockwell Kent called "the best American wood engraver working," "The Great Chain of Life" will be cherished by new generations of readers.

[Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky] is, in fact, the most intelligent, thoughtful, original, challenging, and highly entertaining work of nature writing since Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams. . . . It is her broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give Trudy Dittmar's first but fully mature book its remarkable originality and considerable power. --Robert Finch, Los Angeles Times Book ReviewHonest self-scrutiny is irresistible, especially when told with a knack for diction of place, as this author demonstrates on every page. She is both of the landscape and an informed observer of it, willing to examine her conflicts between the experiences that play in her imagination and the scientific knowledge she's gleaned through training and reading. --The Bloomsbury ReviewTrudy Dittmar is an elegant stylist and an acute observer. She's read everything there is to read about the physics of rainbows, the habits of the porcupine, the winter survival skills of the moose and the orbits of the planets, but even her learning is outdistanced by her patient powers of looking, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. Her originality arises out of this patience. And, magically, she is able to read into and out of the rich, endangered natural world an Emersonian understanding of self. This is at once the most objective and subjective book I have ever read. --Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own StoryDittmar writes about life with the precision of a scientist and the introspective lyricism of a poet, illuminating for us those parts of the world we barely remember to notice...from the complex emotional lives of cows and pronghorns to the dazzling leaves of a silver maple to the teeming hidden pools of bright salamanders. Reading this book is like finding a geode in a stream bed--crack it open and it sparkleso--Jo Ann Beard Dittmar, who won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer' Award in 2000 and whose writings have appeared in numerous publications . . . provides a fascinating look at natural and personal history in these ten essays on animals, plants, and other natural phenomena. . . . An excellent choice for both public and academic libraries. --Library JournalIn essays with settings that range from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, to the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Trudy Dittmar weaves personal experience with diverse threads of subject matter to create unexpected connections between human nature and nature at large. Life stories, elegantly combined with mindful observations of animals, plants, landscape and the skies, theories in natural science, environmental considerations, and touches of art criticism and popular culture, offer insights into the linked analogies of nature and soul. A glacial pond teeming with salamanders in arrested development is cause for reflection on the limits of a life that knows only bounty. The hot blue lights of celestial phenomena are a metaphor for fast, flashy men--he loves of a life--and a romantic career is interpreted. Watching a pronghorn buck battling for, and ultimately losing, his harem leads to a meditation on a kind of immortality.Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky is testimony to the bearing and consequence of nature in one life, and to the richness of understanding it can bring to all human lives.Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in New Jersey farm country. In addition to holding an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago, she is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in writing and the founder and former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, Georgia Review, and Orion. She divides her time between her family home in New Jersey and her cabin in Wyoming

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.