num_pages: 285
description: When Julian Green first set foot in New York in 1919 he felt it would have been better to die than to leave his beloved France. Although an American, he was Parisian born and bred and still immersed in memories of the war and of his dead mother. Recondite, proud and acutely sensitive, this devout young Catholic was exiled from his country, his language and his religion. But from the moment he arrives in Charlottesville, where he is to spend three years studying at the University of Virginia, Green begins to feel more at peace. For he is in the South, the land of his parents; a land haunted by family shadows, by his mother's teachings of the tragic history of the Civil War and her memories of a place 'where roses bloom in the heart of winter'. Part of him had come home.Beneath the sycamores and the gleaming white colonnades of a campus designed by Thomas Jefferson, this highly impressionable and unworldy youth is initiated into the beauties of the classics and the language of Shakespeare. But human beauty also makes its mark, and Green's early éducation sentimentale is both passionate and painful. Wanting to become a priest, his experiences in America engage him in a profound and obsessive battle between the desires of the flesh and his own zealous dedication to the spirit.He describes with eloquence and honest how he gradually realizes that he is not alone; how he comes to accept the true nature of his sexual identity and, at last, allows himself to fall in love.He also comes to terms with the Yankees -- who he initially thought of as 'barbarians' -- and with the South, a landscape that had filled his imagination from an early age and which went on to have a lasting and tangible influence on his career as a writer. Over sixty years later in The Distant Lands and The Stars of the South, Green's epic novels of the South before and during the Civil War, he recreates the splendour of his Uncle Will's home, 'The Lawn', where he spend many of his vacations from university. Altogether, a dozen of Green's books, including his play South and his classics novels Moira and Each Man in his Darkness, are set in America.
language: English
title: Love in America: Autobiography Volume III
titlecomplete: Love in America: Autobiography Volume III (1919-1922)
ratings_count: 16
publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd