This mature, exquisite collection of personal essays by Hilary Masters offers a rare pleasure. Here are meditations and reflections distilled in fine prose from a long and varied life musings that, in the distinguished tradition of essays carried on since the days of Montaigne, articulate the piquant insights of the writer s experience. In this collection, one of the most illustrious contemporary essayists transfigures incidents and observations into something far more a finely crafted window into the workings of experience and memory.
Masters makes readers privy to a youthful love affair; an adolescent s discovery in Defoe s Robinson Crusoe of the key to an immigrant grandfather s plight; and the significance of growing trees, making gravy, and playing cards. He draws intimate portraits of such characters as his famous father, Edgar Lee Masters; his literary friends Wright Morris and William Humphrey; and the strangers who both complicated and enriched his life. In glimpses of moments from naive youth through heady young adulthood to aging maturity, these essays tell the story of a life deeply, broadly, and thoroughly lived.