Summer Doorways
by W. S. Merwin
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Description
America today is a mobile society. Many of us travel abroad, and few of us live in the towns or cities where we were born. It wasn't always so. "Travel from America to Europe became a commonplace, an ordinary commodity, some time ago, but when I first went such departure was still surrounded with an atmosphere of adventure and improvisation, and my youth and inexperience and my all but complete lack of money heightened that vertiginous sensation," writes W. S. Merwin. Twenty-one, married and show more graduated from Princeton, the poet embarked on his first visit to Europe in 1948 when life and traditions on the continent were still adjusting to the postwar landscape. Summer Doorways captures Merwin at a similarly pivotal time before he won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1952 for his first book, A Mask for Janus--the moment was, as the author writes, "an entire age just before it was gone, like a summer." show lessTags
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Member Reviews
I wonder if Merwin had not had all the chance opportunities in his early life, if he would have become the man he was. His seems to be a life well-lived.
even his prose dances!
A look back on the author's early years and his first encounter with Europe in the 1950s
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Published Reviews
ThingScore 100
There are fairy-tale elements to Merwin’s narrative of the summer that changed his life. He enters an enchanted world of princesses and movie stars, villas perched like migratory birds on the cliffs of the French Riviera, and forests in the heart of New Jersey where deer and elk walk amid trees hundreds of years old. One advantage of writing nonfiction is that it doesn’t have to be show more plausible; it just has to be true. show less
added by EvelynWaugh
Lists
Coming of Age
33 works; 1 member
Author Information
90+ Works 4,055 Members
W. S. Merwin was born William Stanley Merwin in New York City on September 30, 1927. He received a bachelor's degree from Princeton University in 1948 and did some graduate work there in Romance languages. He worked as a tutor and translator while writing poetry. In 1952, his first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was awarded the Yale show more Younger Poets Prize. He wrote numerous collections of poetry including Green with Beasts, The Moving Target, The Lice, The Compass Flower, The Rain in the Trees, The River Sound, The Moon Before Morning, and Garden Time. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for The Carrier of Ladders and in 2009 for The Shadow of Sirius, the National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for The Vixen. He also published essays, short fiction, memoirs, and translations of Dante, Pablo Neruda, and Osip Mandelstam. Merwin's other works included Unframed Originals, The Lost Upland, The Ends of the Earth, and Summer Doorways. He also received the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN Translation Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Tanning Prize and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. He died on March 15, 2019 at the age of 91. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Summer Doorways
- Original title
- Summer Doorways: A Memoir
- Important places
- New York, USA
- Dedication
- To Galway Kinnell and Edmund Keeley
- First words
- A summer descends to us from earlier years, heir to ancestors it never knew.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)and evanescent as a work of art, an entire age just before it was gone, like summer.
- Publisher's editor
- Malloy
- Original language
- English
Classifications
- Genres
- Biography & Memoir, Fiction and Literature, Literature Studies and Criticism, Poetry
- DDC/MDS
- 811.54 — Literature & rhetoric American literature in English American poetry 20th Century 1945-1999
- LCC
- PS3563 .E75 .Z474 — Language and Literature American literature American literature Individual authors 1961-
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 68
- Popularity
- 460,043
- Reviews
- 3
- Rating
- (3.85)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- ASINs
- 1
