LUCKY GENERATION

The Lucky Generation: Growing up in Depression and War; a Memoir is a book about memory and history and about the way they intersect and sometimes conflict. It is about growing up in the 1930s and ’ 40s in Hardwick, a small town in Northern Vermont, caught between the old ways and the emerging modern world. It contains both a provincial story and a universal experience; a personal story and the story of a generation. This is a book about food and material culture, movies and radio, dancing and baseball. Finally, it is about breaking away from small-town ways into a world shaped by Depression and War.

Allen Freeman Davis was born and grew up in Hardwick, Vermont. His parents owned the general store his grandfather built. He graduated from Hardwick Academy in 1949, and from Dartmouth College in 1953. He earned an MA from the University of Rochester and a Ph.D. in American Intellectual History from the University of Wisconsin in 1959. He is the author or editor of a dozen books including American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, Still Philadelphia: A Photographic History, Generations: Your Family in Modern America History, and Postcards From Vermont. He taught American History at the University of Missouri and Temple University in Philadelphia. He was visiting professor at the University of Texas, and he held the John Adams Chair in American Civilization at the University of Amsterdam. He has lectured widely in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians, and the former president of the American Studies Association. He lives in Philadelphia, but he spends summers at the Davis family camp on Caspian Lake in Greensboro, Vermont, only seven miles from where he was born.