Gallagher's Travels (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

McGarry, Professor Jean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801856345 ISBN 13: 9780801856341

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997

Synopsis

WAMPANOAG, R.I.--It's the early 1970s and the golden age of the newspaper is drawing to a close. At big city dailies, computers have replaced manual typewriters and linotype machines. Calls from the managing editor to "Remake page one!" or "Stop the presses!" are now distant echoes. But in small-town New England, the Wampanoag Times still puts out newspapers the old-fashioned way. For Catherine Gallagher, an ambitious and eager college graduate, it's the perfect place to begin a career as a reporter. Her first stories, however, are not exactly the stuff of Pulitzer prizes. Instead of the city beat, she's assigned to the Woman's Page, where she covers weddings and anniversaries. Then she starts writing stories that get her noticed, and when she's offered a chance to work at a big-city newspaper, she shrugs off her fear and leaps at the chance. Once there, she finds that there's a price for success.

Jean McGarry's latest novel, Gallagher's Travels, is a fast-paced, vivid tale set against a backdrop of late-breaking stories and colorful newsroom characters. With knowing insight, McGarry charts the emotional and vocational development of a woman determined to succeed in a profession rife with condescension and sexism. McGarry perfectly captures the rhythms of newspaper life and in Catherine Gallagher has created a character--inspired in part by the newshounds of The Front Page and His Girl Friday--both thoroughly authentic and wholly engaging.

About this title

About the Author

Jean McGarry is a professor in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of the novel The Courage of Girls, as well as of three short story collections available from Johns Hopkins: Home at Last, The Very Rich Hours, and Airs of Providence.Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction John T. Irwin, General Editor

Reviews

In pithy but generally uninspired prose, McGarry (The Courage of Girls) carves a dimly lit tunnel of grim, hardboiled vision through a dark mass of urban decay--in this case, the decay of that gritty American institution, the independent newspaper, during the 1970s. Her heroine, Catherine Gallagher (always referred to by her surname) bids an eager farewell to college life--her senior thesis is titled "Crazy Eights: The Mid-Career of Federico Fellini"--for what she hopes will be a rough-and-tumble career at the Wampanoag (R.I.) Times. Gallagher yearns to be one of the newsmen, but--alas!--is relegated to the Women's page. Her mentor and lover, hard-bitten newsman Jack McGuire, encourages her passion for "real" news, and Gallagher makes ripples when she skewers two local fixtures who run a private school--and makes waves when she defends welfare. At McGuire's urging, Gallagher leaves New England (grumpy dad, empathic mom, dull, defensive boyfriend) to chase scoops for the Michigan Depointe Bullet but once again finds herself relegated to the light side--this time Entertainment. In the muted climax to this slice of increasingly corporatized life, Gallagher's work performance is nixed by the editor whose advances she has rejected--and whose newfangled ideals of business-friendly reportage are incurably alien to her. "It wasn't a tragedy," she shrugs, "just the end." Which is the kind of stoicism the reader has come to expect from this muckraking, bar-hopping tough cookie who doesn't suffer Yahoos gladly.

Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Fresh out of college in the early 1970s, Caff Gallagher takes a job at her small hometown New England newspaper. Eager and ambitious, she's assigned to the Women's Page but soon starts writing occasionally brilliant features. In less than a year, she lands a job at a big-city Michigan newspaper at a time when automation is revolutionizing journalism. She faces choices, of course?in her career, in her love affairs, in leaving behind her ethnically and class-rooted family?but that's the gist of this story. Here, as in her three story collections and the novel The Courage of Girls (LJ 4/1/92), McGarry stresses the isolation of the individual in prose that is often gritty and terse but also ironically humorous. An appealing work for general readers.?Mary Margaret Benson, Linfield Coll. Lib., Mcminnville, Ore.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801856345
• ISBN 13: 9780801856341
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 232