The Bookmaker's Daughter: A Memory Unbound - Hardcover

Abbott, Shirley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0899195180 ISBN 13: 9780899195186

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1991

Synopsis

The author offers a memoir of her Arkansas childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, examining her difficult relationship with her father--a gentleman bandit who passed on to his daughter his love of language and books

About this title

From the Publisher:

With a New Introduction by the Author.

If All Arkansas Read the Same Book/2006 Selected by the Arkansas Center for the Book

From the Inside Flap:

This deeply felt memoir is a journey through family history, feminist insight, and southern mythology. In it a daughter reflects on the complicated and volatile love she and her father shared. Shirley Jean Abbott grew up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the 1940s and 50s and was the beloved daughter of Alfred Bemont Abbott, affectionately known as ?Hat.” Hat wasn’t a bookmaker in the literary sense, even though he allowed Shirley’s mother to believe as much while they were dating. Rather, his craft was gambling, and his business was horse racing. Despite the corruption, which put food on the table and rabbit coats in the closet, Abbott remembers the kind and attentive father who spent nights reading to her. He alone is responsible for opening the door to a world of language and literature for her. And she ran with it. Against her father’s wishes, after graduation she headed for New York City. In the end, the girl he had nurtured into an independent and intelligent young woman had outgrown the small town where she grew up. The Bookmaker’s Daughter was originally published by Ticknor and Fields in 1992 and was a Book of the Month Club selection.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0899195180
• ISBN 13: 9780899195186
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290