The Younger Son (1) - Hardcover

In this first volume of his autobiography, the Pultizer Prize-winning author traces life up to his discharge from the Army in 1945. Shapiro, intensely conscious of being a Russian Jew in the South, describes his initiation into the worlds of women and sex, poetry and literature and also deals extensively with his war experience. But always the focus is on his emergence as a poet. In some ways this work could be described as an American Jew's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Writing in an impressionistic third person, Shapiro presents an intimate picture of a young poet emerging in the era of Williams, Pound, Eliot, and New Criticism. Readers interested in American poetry in this century will eagerly await the two volumes to come. Stephen H. Cape, Indiana Univ. Lib., Bloomington
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Now nearly 75 years old, critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Shapiro here recalls his upbringing in Baltimore and Virginia, his introduction to literature and to sex, his WW II Army service in Australia and the Pacific. He deals perceptively with social relationships and everyday affairs, yet because he always refers to himself in the third person as "the poet," he removes himselfand the readerfrom much of the passion and sharpness that characterize his verse. One strives to identify with Shapiro's feelings, longings, goals, but the cool detachment of his recollections acts like the interposition of an opaque, dreamlike curtain between author and reader. Photos not seen by PW .
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.