Mostly grave thoughts on mortality and other matters / Eugene Goodheart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goodheart, Eugene.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Goodheart, Eugene.

Scholars--United States--Biography.

Scholars.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

xvii, 159 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick : Transaction Publishers, 2013.

Summary:

This is the story of the making of a world-famous sociologist. It is even more the story of a boy hustling to survive. Here in an astonishing and candidly written memoir by one of America's premier social scientists recounting the intensely personal story of his tormented youth in a ghetto within a ghetto. It etches the painful details of a boy's overcoming alienation and isolation in a hostile place in an unloving family. The recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography, this new, augmented edition contains the author's reflection of the impact of the Great Depression on Harlem family life. What it means to be a Jew lies at the very heart of this book, a provocative memoir and a thoughtful speculation on the nature of jewish identity and experience in an increasingly secular world. Goodheart takes the reader from his coming of age in Brooklyn to his higher education at Columbia College in the early fifties and beyond to his varied career as university teacher and literary critic. The memoir provides memorable characterizations of writers whom the author knew, among them Lionel Trilling (his teacher), Saul Bellow, Richard Wright (whom he met in Paris), Hannah Arendt, and Philip Rahv. Book jacket.

Contents:

Whistling in the dark

Untethered

The thin man

Suddenly last summer

Happily ever after

Father of the man

Fast friends

Regrets only

The fiery lieutenant

Sticks and stones

Sports allegory.

ISBN:

9781412849821

1412849829

OCLC:

824088010