Synopses & Reviews
For Americans who grew up in the 1930s, the phrase "before the war" calls up a distant time as remote from the way we live now as some foreign country. Those years of the Great Depression were lean ones for most Americans; jobs were scarce and nobody had any money. But all was not struggle and hardship; it was also a time of innocence, kindness, and generosity. It is this special time that Samuel Hynes, a distinguished scholar and wartime marine pilot, captures in this lyrical memoir of his midwestern boyhood.
Born in 1924, Sam Hynes grew up in cities and towns and on farms around the country, following his father to wherever there was work, and eventually to Minneapolis. Though Hynes's family lived through hard times, he remembers his early years not as a time of pinched deprivation but as a golden stretch of opportunities and discoveries. Looking back with a clear-eyed, unsentimental gaze, Hynes describes the rough-and-tumble games in back alleys and a long hot summer on a farm, the temptations of sex, stealing, and drinking, and the wonder of falling in love for the first time. Here, too, are deeply etched portraits of Hynes's widowed father and of the feisty widow he brought home to be stepmother to his sons. Hynes's new memoir recaptures what came before the war he fought in: his dreams, his adventures, his sins and triumphs. Moving, written with great clarity and humor, The Growing Seasons is the story of a truly American boyhood.
Review
"This honest, scrupulously organized study of Hynes's Depression-era boyhood has the simple effectiveness of a family photograph....What Hynes achieves with journalistic eloquence is showing a way of life and presenting an affectionate portrait of people who rarely verbalize their feelings but show love in subtle, unexpected ways." Publishers Weekly
Review
"[The Growing Seasons] will go down as a classic account of growing up male in America....[Y]oung Sam Hynes emerges with extraordinary vividness, caught fresh and squirming in the stream of memory....Tenderness and irony go hand in hand in The Growing Seasons, and never more so than when the boy is about to become a man." Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"It is nothing really extraordinary, nothing uncommon; it's just a story told with uncommon narrative skill....Comfortable as an old cardigan and more than simple nostalgia: a memoir in turns sagacious and poignant, the way it ought to be." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
From the author of the wartime memoir, Flights of Passage, comes a spare and poignant account of coming of age in the years before World War II changed America. 35 photos.
About the Author
Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of several major works of literary criticism, including The Auden Generation, Edwardian Occasions, and The Edwardian Turn of Mind. Hynes's wartime experiences as a Marine Corps pilot were the basis for his highly praised memoir, Flights of Passage. The Soldiers' Tale, his book about soldiers' narratives of the two world wars and Vietnam, won a Robert F. Kennedy Award. He is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.