The Great Pretender by James Atlas (1986, Hardcover)

Description: WILL COMBINE SHIPPING COSTS FOR MULTIPLE ITEMS Ben Janis, innocent and erudite, has two fiercely opposed dreams.One is to become a famous writer. The other is to obey the dictum of Henry "Live all you can." A Byron of the suburbs, obsessed with poetry and girls, Ben responds to "The Wasteland" and the Beach Boys with the same intense, ecstatic fervor; his touchstones are "The Oxford Book of English Verse" and the Top Forty list. Growing up in the middle-class college town of Evanston, Illinois, Ben struggles to keep up with the intellectual demands of his father, a doctor with a taste for chamber music and James Joyce. But sex keeps getting in the way. It's the Sixties, when ever seventeen-year-old is licensed to behave like Henry Miller. Do your own only Ben's thing is browsing second-hand bookshops and scribbling villanelles. While he memorized French verbs in his bedroom after dinner, adolescent temptresses in cut-off blue jeans wait outside in their parents' cars, luring him into sin. Admitted to Harvard, Ben never quite manages to locate the college life he'd read about in the cheerful brochure. Instead of enjoying autumn football games and bracing seminars on the great books, he finds himself wandering on the fringes. He beseeches a famous poet to read his own fledgling efforts ('Put on a tie! my father cried at noon/I loitered in the bathroom, pale, jejune'); joins a club for rejects from other clubs; becomes editor of the literary magazine only to discover that he's the whole staff. And he falls in love with Eleanor Josephs, an aspiring writer at Radcliffe, who becomes both his Muse and his Nemesis as she teaches him more about reality than he cares to know. After he wins a fellowship to Oxford, Ben and Eleanor embark on their year abroad.

Price: 7.99 USD

Location: Houston, Texas

End Time: 2024-11-17T01:58:46.000Z

Shipping Cost: 5.38 USD