"The portraits are at once funny and sad but they are portraits in 
the round, of people understood and accepted, and in their strong 
individuality, a touch of universality. A model demonstration of 
the uses of memory."—The New Yorker

"An immensely artful book, which is to say that the care its 
author has taken with his arrangements ensures the illusions of 
truth."—Newsweek

"The novelist's willingness to reshape time for meaning guides 
this memoir; so does the photographer's ability to focus, frame 
and crop for impact. An elegant book."—Los Angeles Times

Originally published by David R. Godine in 1982.

_________________________________________________________

HILARY MASTERS grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He is the 
author of eight novels, two story collections, and a collection of 
essays. He's been a Fulbright lecturer to Finland and the 
recipient of Yaddo fellowships and an Award for Literature from 
the American Academy of Arts & Letters. His essays have been 
republished in Best American Essays and Anchor Best Essays, 
and his short fiction has been cited in Best American Short Stories 
and Pushcart. He is professor of English and creative writing at 
Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 
PHILLIP LOPATE is the author of four essay collections, two novels, 
and two poetry collections. He currently teaches at Hofstra University.



What people are saying about this book

"A family history that manages—through imagination as well as 
recollection and research—to connect and interweave the American 
past, present, and future. Though Masters is deeply concerned 
with the relationship of his family's history to his country's, he is 
even more deeply involved with attempting to search for answers to 
the mystery of identity, to speculate about what it is that brought 
him to where he is now. And he never loses sight of the essential 
truth that we can never know the past, that the most we can hope 
to do is reinvent it for whatever meaning it offers to the present. A 
luminous, consequential book."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington 
Post Book World

"A book that is small, whole and thoroughly satisfying. Brings the 
dead to life by ventriloquism and mimicry. Recollections as fixed 
and poignant as family photographs. The portrait of the old writer 
[Edgar Lee Masters] remains indelible."—New York Times Book 
Review

"An affecting and exquisitely drawn family portrait by the son of 
the poet Edgar Lee Masters."—Library Journal