Learning to fly : a writer's memoir / Mary Lee Settle ; edited by Anne Hobson Freeman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Settle, Mary Lee

Contributor:

Freeman, Anne Hobson, 1934-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Settle, Mary Lee.

Authors, American--20th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

v, 224 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton & Co., [2007]

Summary:

Two years before her death in 2005, Mary Lee Settle sat down to "trace the way that led me into being the writer I have become." The result is this memoir, which picks up her life story where Addie (1998) left it, with a girl turning twenty, head over heels in love with the language of Shakespeare and determined to be an actress. That summer of 1938 her mother sends Mary Lee off to a theater apprenticeship, inadvertently setting her on a road few women of that era would have dared to travel.

The road will lead to serious, "uncompromised" writing and over twenty books, including her masterwork, The Beulah Quintet. The adventures along the way-from the glamour of New York during the World's Fair, through the terrors of buzz bombs and V2 rockets in London during the war, to the trials and triumphs of the postwar literary world-will delight, inform, and occasionally alarm the reader of this thoroughly modern Canterbury Tale.

Contents:

Prelude to the Summer of 1938 7

1 From Barter to Manhattan 12

2 The Last Grand Summer 29

3 Waiting 41

4 Toronto 53

5 Prewar in the United States, 1941-1942 67

6 Thirteen Months in the WAAF 76

7 London, 1944 93

8 Leaving 122

9 The Turning Year 134

Part II The Apprenticeship 145

10 Another Country 151

11 Mr. Eliot 165

12 Coronation 173

13 Nine Years 176

14 Maugham 178

15 My Paris 192

Appendix A Glimpse of Tom 211.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Schaffer fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9780393057324