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The
Biggest City in America
A Fifties Boyhood in
Ohio
by Richard B. Schwartz
210 pp.,
illustrations
Cloth
978-1-884836-49-7; $39.95 SALE $15.98
Paper
978-1-884836-50-3; $24.95 SALE
$9.98
Ohio History and
Culture
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| In a series of
stories drawn from his own experience coming of age during the 1950s,
Richard B. Schwartz revisits his boyhood in southern Ohio. His memories
of adolescence bring back the birth of rock and roll, the rigors and
absurdities of religion and parochial schools, trials of little league
baseball, grueling summer construction work and caddying jobs, the thin
pleasures of 3.2% beer, drag racing lore, and, of course, the youthful
discovery of sex.
By turns hilarious
and poignant, satiric and nostalgic, the book focuses on a period and
place through a perspective somehow both engaged and withdrawn--engaged
through its feeling of innocent immediacy, and distanced because of the
awareness developed in the intervening decades. If the memoir expresses
a sense of loss at the passing of good times, it also exhibits a sense
of relief at the end of those awkward years.
Richard B. Schwartz
has written a book that will appeal to many readers, whatever their
age, but perhaps especially to those who remember the fifties as they
were and as they might have been, when we grew up yearning for slow
dances and fast cars, and every little town seemed like the biggest
city in America.
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Richard
B. Schwartz is Dean
of the College of Arts and Science at the University of
Missouri-Columbia. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of
Notre Dame, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of
Illinois. He has written six books, including Daily Life in
Johnson's London, After the Death of Literature,
and Frozen Stare, a novel released by St. Martin's
Press in 1989. He has also edited two collections and published in many
journals, including Studies in English Literature
and Modern Philology.
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