A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence - Hardcover

Simon, Kate

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060155264 ISBN 13: 9780060155261

Publisher: Harper & Row, 1986

Synopsis

A memoir of the author's coming of age in Depression era New York.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

A sequel to Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood, Simon's memoir is as image-rich and revealing as her distinguished travel books about Paris, London, etc. The author vivifies the people who figured in her life as a teenager: a disapproving father she escaped by means of low-paying jobs during the Depression; her spunky mother, an advocate of women's rights; radical intellectuals who encouraged her love of the arts. There is a great deal about Simon's sexual relations and the amatory experiences of friends, and about lesbian professors during her years at Hunter College. There are details on the author's living with a man, an almost unheard of arrangement during the 1930s. For the most part, this is the story of an eager young woman trying on various personalities by affecting outre costumes and airs until she arrived, almost imperceptibly, at "a second birth, after a long, erratic labor" during adolescence. In the moving, frequently funny events frankly detailed, readers discover the self-described "bright fantasist and loonywanderer" and understand why she was not quite lost in the mature woman.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

In A Wider World: Portraits in an Adolescence , Simon continues the autobiography she began in Bronx Primitive. Kate was a maverick; the daughter of Jewish immigrants in the Bronx in the 1930s, she rebelled against her overbearing father while still a young adolescent and virtually raised herself. She worked as a mother's helper for artistic Village families, summered at communistic summer colonies, explored Harlem, camped out with a boyfriend when she was 16. Through the wealth of experiences, Simon struggled to learn about herself trying on this and that image in vain adolescent posturing. An honest, dramatic picture of what it was like to be a certain adolescent at a certain place and time. Recommended. Janet Boyarin Blundell, MLS, Brookdale Community Coll., Lincroft, N.J.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper & Row
• Publication date: 1986
• ISBN 10: 0060155264
• ISBN 13: 9780060155261
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1