String Too Short to Be Saved (Paperback)

“These vivid New Hampshire farm sketches from Hall's well-spent youth―all written when he was full-grown―are as much attuned to the supple and enticing utilities of language as they are grounded in a vanished time which may, at a glimpse, seem simple, but were complex and rich and not simple at all.”―Richard Ford

This is a collection of story-essays diverse in subject but united by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things: a childhood, perhaps a culture.

In an Epilogue written for this edition, Donald Hall describes his return to the farm twenty-five years later, to live the rest of his life in the house that held a box of string too short to be saved.

Donald Hall was not only one of America’s poet laureates but one of the great personal essayists. “If any American writer deserves the description of ‘man of letters,’” the New York Times Book Review wrote, “it is Donald Hall.” Mr. Hall approached writing as he approached life―with simplicity, affection, and a wry wit. He distilled the human experience with a sense of humor that readers will return to again and again, each time learning something new. His work glows with the affection he held for the land, the people, and the customs of rural New England, and especially for the small, New Hampshire dairy farm near Ragged Mountain he visited every summer as a child.

Daniel Okrent was the first public editor of The New York Times, editor-at-large of Time, and managing editor of Life magazine. Among his books, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in history, and Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition was honored by the American Historical Association as 2011’s best book of American history. Okrent lives in Manhattan and on Cape Cod with his wife, poet Rebecca Okrent.