A Darkening Green
A Darkening Green: Notes on Harvard, the 1950's and the End of Innocence Peter Prescott, Anne Lake Prescott (Introduction)
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412810094
DDC: 378.7444
Edition: Paperback; 2009-05-31
Summary:
This is a book about the end of childhood. Much of it is drawn
directly from a diary the author kept while he was a bright but
insecure freshman at Harvard in the 1950s. From these pages emerges a
precise description of the raw, half-understood experience of late
adolescence-the anguish and arguments, the rivalry and anxiety about
sex, the facile cynicism and desperate fumblings for purpose, the
bull sessions held late at night-just as Peter Prescott recorded them
only hours after the event. These diary excerpts are contained in a
narrative that examines that freshman experience from a vantage point
of twenty years. Thus, we are able to look at the past with a double
perspective: The exact record, unclouded by memory or nostalgia, of
what was said and done is set in a structure that reveals the form of
the experience. The result is an ironic, witty, and often moving
book. Writing with some compassion and even more asperity, Peter S.
Prescott not only captures the conflicts and emotions of a single
year, but probes beneath the surface of memory to explore certain
tribal customs and rites of passage as they are played out in the
classrooms and living quarters of the college. A few famous people-T.
S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell among them-play brief parts in this
chronicle, but young Prescott’s attention was primarily engaged in
his struggle with his extravagant roommates and an assortment of
eccentric undergraduates.
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