Modern American memoirs
By: selected and edited by Annie Dillard and  Cort Conley.
Contributors: Dillard, Annie.; Conley, Cort, 1944-
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1995
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 449
Subjects: Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography.; American prose literature -- 20th century.; Autobiographies.; United States -- Biography.
Description: The best writers tell true stories that fascinate not because they are true but because they are good stories. The people in them spring to life: James McConkey's stump-armed landlord in Court of Memory, Maxine Hong Kingston's hilarious aunt in The Woman Warrior, Geoffrey Wolff's scoundrel father in The Duke of Deception.

Their events are vivid: Harry Crews, playing as a boy, falls into a vat of boiling water with a dead hog. Ralph Ellison visits a tenement to circulate a petition and finds four coal-shovelers discussing grand opera. Chris Offutt joins a circus as a walrus and watches a tattooed woman swallow a fluorescent light. Zora Neale Hurston, doing anthropological fieldwork, runs afoul of a knife-toting jealous woman in a Florida juke joint.

Their worlds differ: Maureen Howard practices elocution; Frank Conroy practices yo-yo tricks. A young Navajo herder meets a woman on an Arizona hilltop; young Cynthia Ozick stockpiles issues of The Writer magazine in her closet in the Bronx. Sixteen-year-old Don Asher plays the piano for strippers called the Glamazons; statesman Henry Adams in his sixties plays with magnets on his desk.