A Lucky American Childhood (Singular Lives) - Hardcover

Engle, Paul

4

19 ratings by Goodreads

9780877455400: A Lucky American Childhood (Singular Lives)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877455406 ISBN 13: 9780877455400

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1996

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Born in 1908, Paul Engle grew up the son of a livery stable keeper. As he writes in his dedication to this loving account, "I had a lucky life. Such a way will never be lived here again. It has gone with the wild buffalo skinners and the Indian fighters, with my mother's hands whose tough calluses tore the sheets as she made my bed, with that marvelous rich reek of harnesses and saddle leather, of horse manure and sweat which I happily breathed each day."
The anecdotes are rich and captivating. As a boy Engle sold newspapers to factory workers at Quaker Oats and followed his route out to the city limits where coyotes howled in the woods. He helped his father break and train gaited saddle horses in all weathers and seasons. From family holidays with lively activities, uncles, aunts, and memorable foods to his job in the neighborhood drugstore dispensing castor oil, sodas, tonics, and linaments, Engle's absorbing stories capture the characters and atmosphere of American life just after the turn of the century.

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Review:

The legacy of poet Paul Engle, who died in 1991, includes the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, which he helped found in 1967, and the memoir A Lucky American Childhood. Engle grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, during the 1920s on a hardscrabble farm where his family struggled to make ends meet. Not necessarily the normal training ground for a poet and educator, but Engle finds in his childhood the raw materials that shaped him not only as a poet but as a person as well.

About the Author:

Paul Engle began to teach in the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1937, and directed the workshop from 1943 to 1966.

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