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"Nineteen forty-six was agood time — perhaps the best time — in the twentieth century. Thewar was over and there was a terrific sense of coming back, ofrepossessing life. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and itseemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had."

Book De*ion "Nineteen forty-six was a
good time — perhaps the best time — in the twentieth century. The
war was over and there was a terrific sense of coming back, of
repossessing life. Rents were cheap, restaurants were cheap, and it
seemed to me that happiness itself might be cheaply had." 
 
Broyard made his first bid for happiness by moving in with a young
painter, the difficult and challenging Sheri Donatti — a protegee
of Anais Nin — who never wore underpants and who "embodied the new
trends in art, sex, and psychosis." Broyard tells their story; by
turns comic and poignant, while describing along the way his
meetings with Caitlan and Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, Dwight
MacDonald, Maya Deren, William Gaddis, and other writers and
artists just beginning their careers. He opens a bookstore on
Cornelia Street ("If it hadn't been for books we would have been
entirely at the mercy of sex. Books steadied us, they gave us
gravity."). He goes to the New School and listens to Eric Fromm,
Karen Horney and Meyer Shapiro ("I went to him as students, twenty
years later, would go to India."). He tries going to a
psychoanalysist ("I never gave him a chance. l had a literature
rather than a personality."). 
 
In dazzling prose, Broyard captures with crystalline clarity the
feeling of a particular time and place "when everything mattered,
everything was serious." With economy, style, wit, flair, and
astounding powers of observation, Broyard has left us a most
remarkable memoir. 
 
From Kirkus Reviews 
Brilliant, funny, penetrating observations on life and culture in
N.Y.C. after WW II from critic Broyard, who died of cancer in 1990
(Intoxicated by My Illness, 1992). ``Nineteen forty-six was a good
time--perhaps the best time-- in the twentieth century,'' writes
Broyard, and the reader wishes that the critic were still here to
write a dozen more books just like this wonderful one to explain
further exactly what he means. Broyard was 26 the year after the
war, and his entree to then housing-scarce Greenwich Village took
the form of moving in with the difficult and challenging Sheri
Donatti, enigmatic abstract painter, wearer of no underpants, and
proteg?e of Ana?s Nin. Comedy both ribald and poignant follows as
Broyard tells the tale of his brief life with Sheri--including,
along the way, sketches of his meetings with the likes of W.H.
Auden (whom Sheri bumps into- -literally), Erich Fromm, Meyer
Schapiro, Delmore Schwartz and others, including Nin herself (``Her
lipstick was precise, her eyebrows shaved off and penciled in,
giving the impression,'' remarks Broyard, ``that she had written
her own face''). A break with Sheri is inevitable but, by the time
it comes, the reader knows how thoroughly she emblemized the
complicated ironies (and dead-ends) of postwar criticism and
art--and how Broyard was to manage going on afterward in his own
way. Again and again, his independence and right judgment reveal
themselves in a mind that, in a Whitmanesque way, passionately
insists on a genuine integration of life and art: ``I wanted to be
an intellectual, too, to see life from a great height, yet I didn't
want to give up my sense of connection, my intimacy with things.
When I read a book, I always kept one eye on the world, like
someone watching the clock.'' Vital criticism that--in these
woebegone days especially--is wondrously to be valued. 
 
About Author 
Anatole Broyard (1920–1990) was an American literary critic for The
New York Times. In addition to his reviews and columns, he
published several books during his lifetime, and his most
autobiographical works, Intoxicated By My Illness and Kafka Was the
Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir were published after his
death. 
 
Book Dimension : 
length: (cm)20.4 　　　 　　　　　 　 width:(cm)13.3

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Kafka Was The Rage(ISBN=9780679781264)

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