Items related to A Tidewater Morning
In this brilliant collection of "long short stories, " the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
William Styron (1925-2006), a native of the Virginia Tidewater, was a graduate of Duke University and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His books include Lie Down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie’s Choice, This Quiet Dust, Darkness Visible, and A Tidewater Morning. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Howells Medal, the American Book Award, the Légion d’Honneur, and the Witness to Justice Award from the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation. With his wife, the poet and activist Rose Styron, he lived for most of his adult life in Roxbury, Connecticut, and in Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts, where he is buried.
From Kirkus Reviews:
A short little trip into a half-comfortable kind of writerly nostalgia in three stories (declares an Author's Note) that ``reflect the experiences of the author at the ages of twenty, ten, and thirteen.'' Bending his hand again to scenes of WW II, Styron visits (``Love Day'') a Marine Division in the Pacific, offering in brief form a standard cast of characters from Many-a-Movie: the tough but just-a-guy commander; the platoon leader who wants to be a writer; the narrator who has secret home-thoughts and, through them, learns something about meaning and fear. Throughout, the rickety narrative is made forgivable--barely--by the pleasures of the period detail. ``Shadrach,'' set in 1935, is more complex--and perhaps overall less convincing, though even more painstaking in its (in this case) recalling of rural Depression-era details. In it, a middle-class boy admits to his envy of the slovenly but life-rich existence of a family of fallen white trash (the Dabneys), to whom a 99-year-old ex-slave returns to die. Finally, set in 1938, amid rumblings of approaching war, ``A Tidewater Morning'' shows a boy rebelling against one kind of tyranny (his mean and niggardly paper-route boss) while his mother (once a classical singer) dies horribly of the inescapable tyranny of cancer and his father crumbles gradually through weakness and pity. Styronic plusses and minuses: the displeasures of the overly- written-about and revisited, and of the rickety narrative shortcut (``This is a farce! We didn't come out here these thousands of miles to sit around that stinking little island and watch our hands and feet rot off. We were trained to kill Japs, for Christ's sake!''); and, meanwhile, the pleasures of atmosphere, detail, and the now-and-again indisputably lovely phrase. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherRandom House Value Publishing
- Publication date1995
- ISBN 10 0517164507
- ISBN 13 9780517164501
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Rating
(No Available Copies)
Search Books: Create a WantIf you know the book but cannot find it on AbeBooks, we can automatically search for it on your behalf as new inventory is added. If it is added to AbeBooks by one of our member booksellers, we will notify you!
Create a Want